43. June Drop

When I posted the last blog, I wrote about the eleven new women’s groups which have been set up in rural Tanzania, in and around the villages Msamvu and Tunguli. 

This territory has particular need: up-country from the inland town of Morogoro, it regularly gets cut off by the rivers, which become raging torrents in the rainy months. here are only dirt roads, shredded by the seasonal water into potholes and ruts. No villagers have cars, but a few who can afford it, own or share a motorbike, in the hope rather than the expectation that these cheaply made machines can safely make the long bumpy journeys to market or hospital.

It’s ironic, in a part of the world where water creates such problems, that its absence is even more troublesome. In the small health centre in central Tunguli, water is collected from the roof.  For most villagers in the surrounding remote and inaccessible tracts of land, however, the daily task of fetching this unreliable friend falls to the girls and the women.

Speaking of the scarcity of water, please allow me a diversion. 

I am writing this from the Gare du Nord in Paris, where Starbucks have just charged me a week's wages for a thimbleful of organically-sourced skinny de l'eau with an extra shot. And it's raining. If I didn't like the French, I could have achieved the same effect more cheaply by standing on the pavement with my tongue out.

When so many are thirsty for this precious resource, but can't afford the infrastructure,  how did it come about that we fortunate few are happy to pay top dollar for plastic-encased beads of moisture?

I suppose that we just got used to it, like we got used to urban foxes; health and safety; Tony Blair breaking bad; sordidness in The Archers; having to remember your first pet's maiden name; the People's Republic of China replacing Woolworth's; middle-aged cyclists looking cool in bulging yellow lycra; forgetting which one was Stannis; being fraped; Whats-Apping your kids to say breakfast's ready; buying a conservatory in Lidl when you only went out for a croissant; disruptive emoticons; 

 

;  

Big-Mac-with-fries-coke-yes-I-will-go-large-please-and-four-more-sachets-of-bbq-sauce-please being bad for you; estate agents; and Donald Trump's hair.

But where will it lead, this capacity of ours to normalise the unfamiliar and even the bizarre? Our meek acquiescence, for instance, drip by drip and drop for drop, to pay more for rain than for milk? I imagine a conversation in Starbucks, a generation hence:

Me:              Good morning!

Robot:         Good morning surprisingly-not-yet-dead Laurence Wood of Bide-a-Wee Incontinence Village, whose recent online purchases lead me to infer that you may not yet be a dedicated Galaxybucks customer; how can I help you today?

Me:              I'd like a grande aero-cino with an extra breath, please.

Robot:         Would you like that at normal lung humidity, or extra-moist? 

Me:              Ummm ... normal humidity but helium enhanced, please. I need a lift ...

Robot:         LOL, sir. Would you like a gluten-free, lactose-free, nut-free, fat-free, calorie-free, bee-free snack to go with that sir? I'd recommend a raisin. Or an oat.

Me:              Actually, I still haven’t had my sixteen-a-day, so I'd better go with the virtual orange pip ... Oh yes, and also, do you have a cold hand-wash?

Robot:         A frappo-cleano?  Certainly sir. 

How will you be paying? Mortgage or krugerrand?

Of course I will be lucky to be alive a generation hence, to witness this scenario. (My wife, looking over my shoulder, says she will be lucky if I'm not.)

Anyway, in rural Tanzania, ironically cheap water washes away the soil and the roads, and infected water kills the vulnerable. On the other hand, lack of water is at the root both of poverty and of its perpetuation: girls have to miss school in order to collect it, from the moment that they can carry a Starbuck-ful on their heads. For many girls in this part of Africa, even if there were a school, they could not attend, because essential household duties interpose themselves in the difficult business of staying alive.

And staying alive can indeed be hard. Nearly 1% of mothers die of pregnancy-related causes, and 10% of children do not reach their fifth birthday. Few earn $2 / day, and most subsist on porridge, plus what they can grow in the unforgiving terrain.

Water problems; poverty; malnutrition; poor transport; no crops; inadequate education; unaffordable, inaccessible childbirth facilities: these are some of the root-causes of tragic death that we anticipate might be highlighted in the current discussions in the eleven women's groups in Tunguli and Msamvu. Thereafter, we hope that the communities, now motivated and focused, might begin long-term sustainable projects to tackle these desperate issues.

But will it work? Will this protracted and meticulous process really arouse the community buy-in we are looking for, whereby village women truly get to grips with the root causes of tragedy, and truly determine, with our help or without it, to make a difference? Well, the WHO says yes it will work, and yes women will feel empowered;  and yes it is indeed the only way to progress. 

But are we missing something? ... let me think ...

I'm now writing this from a pool-side paradise on the island of Elba, a glorious fragment of Tuscany carelessly dropped in the sea when they were making Italy. From where I lounge in the perfect, tingling Italian sun, I can see a host of fruit trees laden with lemons, oranges, avocados, bananas, figs, and those little apricot-coloured ones that aren't kumquats. (Apricots?)

At the feet of these healthy, fecund trees is the 'June drop': in June, a portion of the fruit falls to the ground, to leave room for the rest to flourish. 

This is Nature's thinning-out of the crop, to enhance the abundance of the fruiting. At the right time and with the right help, these mature trees, that began as thin seedlings, will yield rich harvests.

So it will be, perhaps, with the eleven women's groups. They began as fragile plants; barely seedlings: full of the right DNA, but thin and vulnerable. Maybe not all will reach the same maturity. Maybe some of the projects which emerge will drop early to the ground.

But, far from fretting that each fall represents failure of the whole, the important thing is to know that the groups are there, being tended: an orchard of possibility where before there was hunger.

Yes, we are indeed on the right lines.

Water is a case in point. In the past, there have been many examples of water projects failing because they were not initiated by those in need. 

Good people with kind hearts decided perhaps that a village needed water, and paid for a spring or a well. Even if these sponsors managed to avoid the common problem of some of the money disappearing; and managed to ensure that the rest was well-spent; and managed to supervise the project so that good materials were used and were well-engineered; all of this still falls short of having ensured that lives will be saved, and that girls will be educated. See this link for the sobering facts:

http://www.vossfoundation.org/assets/www.rural-water-supply.net_.pdf

Foreign aid cannot be there for ever, maintaining the equipment; dealing with standing water; protecting from infection; encouraging appropriate use; building on success by incorporating  new ideas such as food gardens; changing the culture; and redeploying well the countless hours previously spent by women and girls in collecting this wonderful resource.

When, on the other hand, a village has determined that its objective is to reduce tragic death, if it then decides that access to clean water is part of the solution, it will not put up with poor construction, poor maintenance, or stasis in the primitive culture of subsistence, helplessness, and tolerance of tragedy.

May I finish with a true story that was one of the reasons Tushikamane began:

We have six weeks to go until Canon John Green leads a party from Worcestershire to visit Tunguli and Msamvu. They will get a feel for whether the groups are really going to work, and whether some of them – hopefully most of them – have truly got to grips with what they plan to do to move towards the twenty first century.

It was John Green who encouraged me, exactly three years ago, to go to Berega, to try to help prevent maternal death, by improving standards in the hospital. I knew in theory that more than 80% of deaths occurred in the community and never reached our doors, but I thought that my presence in the maternity ward would at least help. Then, one awful Saturday night in June, a woman was brought in, the middle passenger on a motor-bike, dying of complications of pregnancy. She barely had time to reach a bed before she died. To my indescribable horror, she was then loaded back onto the motorbike, again as a middle passenger, and taken back to her grieving children. The unutterable awfulness of their joy turning to grief when they realised that the returning mother was dead, still haunts me now.

I don't know what she died of, but there are so many ways in which a determined community might have prevented her death with simple interventions: training of birth attendants not to give stimulants; early transport systems; iron to treat anaemia in pregnancy such that any bleeding does not kill you; early detection of pre-eclampsia; clean water and cleanliness to prevent infection; the list of interventions is long, and the list of common killers is short. The story is similar and ten times as common for death of under-fives, where clean water is a huge part of the solution.

We begin with eleven women's groups. 
Maybe some of the groups will not be as strong as others. 
Maybe some will even fail - the June drop of human enterprise.

But if they prevent just one June drop of that more horrific kind, then Tushikamane will have succeeded.