To Fetch a Pail of Water

Natural History, Feb, 1999 by Mary L. Plummer

Nyamutondo Gaspari is now one of the lucky ones in Mwanza, Tanzania--she has a private water tap outside her small house. But until recently, this young mother of four could not afford such a luxury. When we first met, she complained to me of chronic leg and lower back pain, which she attributed to the strain of carrying water. Every day, Nyamutondo, her ten-year-old daughter (her eldest child), and another young girl who lived with the family would go to fetch four five-gallon buckets of water for their household. Usually they paid a fee to draw from a neighborhood tap, but on days when water was scarce, they walked half a mile down from their house on Bugando Hill to fill their buckets directly from nearby Lake Victoria. "Sometimes you reach the source of water only to be told there is no water here, no water there," she explained. "Sometimes those with piped water refuse to sell what they have. Sometimes you go there and they are closed. We never know how far we will have to go to fetch water."

Given those difficulties, Nyamutondo carefully monitored her household's water use. "Because I have small children and they still wet the bed, I have to use one bucket for washing clothes," she told me. "We use the other three buckets for bathing. Each one of us takes a small share of a bucket. Any remaining water I use to wash dishes, to cook, and to boil drinking water." Sometimes, if she hadn't earned enough from working as a tomato vendor to buy sufficient water, Nyamutondo did her family's laundry in the lake.

Obtaining clean water in Mwanza, a city of an estimated 419,000 residents, is a problem in part because the existing water and sewage facilities are out of date, in disrepair, and not integrated. Designed in 1967, the sewage system was built to serve 15,000 people, less than half of Mwanza's population at the time. Today it serves about 80,000 people--more than five times its intended capacity but only a fifth of the burgeoning population. The majority of residents must rely on septic tanks or pit toilets--or simply on the outdoors. The sewage system was supposed to pipe waste outside the city for treatment, but the pumps required for this step broke down in 1990. Now some 925,000 gallons of raw sewage pour each day into a river canal that feeds into Lake Victoria near Mwanza's busy downtown. Schoolchildren race across three narrow pipes that span the sewage-laden canal, daring one another to risk a fall into the murky waters below, while women selling fruits and peanuts nearby ignore the stench. Meanwhile, just over a mile away, water is pumped from the lake for domestic use.

Lake water, the main source for the city, is piped to about eight thousand connections, including scattered public standpipes. This piped water serves about half the population; the rest depend on shallow wells, water taken directly from the lake, or, to a lesser extent, rivers and springs. Water treatment consists of chlorination (an antiquated filtration system broke down years ago and was never replaced). Calcium hypochlorite is stirred into a bucket of water and then added to one of the small vats that feed the city's two supply tanks, which together hold 800,000 gallons. Although this task is usually performed several times a day, it is impossible to accurately monitor how thoroughly the disinfecting chemical gets mixed into the contents of the tanks before water is pumped into the city's distribution system. Many people take the precaution of boiling and filtering their drinking water.

Since only the wealthy have electricity in their homes, most city residents who want to boil their water must consume precious fuel, purchasing charcoal or scouring the already strained landscape for firewood. Inevitably, they minimize their water use or resort to unpurified water, which can precipitate illnesses such as intestinal worms, typhoid, schistosomiasis, and cholera. Statistics are hard to come by, but those from a 1996 study done of 817 children in Mkolani, a ward in the southern part of Mwanza Municipality, are disturbing. Fourteen percent of the children up to the age of fourteen were infected with schistosome worms, while 25 percent had hookworms or roundworms. According to another study, there were 1,124 cases of cholera in Mwanza during the first six weeks of 1998, and these resulted in at least fifty deaths.

Lacking an adequate supply of pure water, Nyamutondo was not always able to follow hygienic practices she knew would benefit her family's health. "Some of the people in the household may not bathe daily, although they usually bathe by the next day," she explained. "It does depend on whether there is enough water in the household, and water availability depends on money. Sometimes you don't have enough money to buy the things you need to boil the water, and you just have to drink the water as it is. That is why you find that children often fall sick." Several years earlier, Nyamutondo and her husband, Gaspari Nyamagati, had lost two children to unidentified illnesses; the four that survived suffered frequently from diarrhea.