Exciting developments in parts of Ethiopia

 

As explained in the video Yiganda is one of the villages located on the shores of the Zege Peninsula that projects into Lake Tana. It is approximately 590 kilometres northwest of the capital, Addis Ababa.

Yiganda is a very quiet village with eight sub-villages all making their livelihoods from picking wild coffee and hops that they grow in their backyards. These plants, interlocked here and there with orange and avocado trees, not only shade the village from the scorching sun but also isolate it from the rest of the world. It’s difficult to see how a village so rustic and isolated could be under the jurisdiction of one of the country’s largest and most lively cities, Bahir Dar.
In most unreached (with water, sanitation and hygiene) places, it’s common to see chequered farms brimming with good harvests or grooved lands prepared for crops, with sheep and goats grazing, oxen or horse ploughing the land, or young men and women digging using pre-modern tools. Here, there is none of that, just a thick coffee and hops forest from end to end. The primary school and a few scattered houses are the only exceptions with some breathing space.

Five minutes walk down from the school lies the wide expanse of a beautiful, grey lake stretching as far as the eyes can see, dotted here and there with monastery islands.

WaterAid’s implementing partner, Jerusalem Children and Community Development Organisation (JeCCDO), has had some concrete experience working in the area. A partnership with WaterAid, started a year ago, has seen thousands of people on the peninsula benefit from safe water and sanitation programmes. In Ura Kidanemihret, for example, public toilets can be seen, built by the locals just for passers by. JECCDO said it was part of their community-led total sanitation initiative to keep their village free of open defecation. They succeeded and, now, anybody driving or walking into their village is first greeted by their proud, white flag flying full mast with an inscription that reads – this village is free from open defecation!

Only about ten kilometres away from Ura, though, lies Yiganda, a village as countrified, if not more isolated, from city ways and quality of life. Yiganda is without proper road patterns – just some footpaths connecting each house to the hub which is the school compound. There is no fence dividing one household from another, no man-made boundaries dividing one coffee plantation from the others. It’s all done by nature or man’s interaction with it – the footpath, the big tree, the lake, the school, the big rock – all serve as boundaries without presenting an obstacle for the free movement of the apes, wild pigs and gazelles that roam about the bush causing the dry leaves that cover the earth to rustle beautifully.
Yiganda’s eight sub-villages host 3,361 people sheltered under 686 households – 264 of which are headed by women. Most of these people do not know how tap water tastes except the few that have been to the main town for business or medical care.

Genetu Addisu (pictured left), 58, is a father of eight. Some of his children are educated and living in the main town of Bahir Dar, which he has visited. He said, “When you see me and others here going about our business like normal people, you may assume we are all healthy and fit. It’s just our figures that you see. We are all sick. I once went to a clinic and was diagnosed with four types of parasites –hookworm, giardia, bilharzia and another amoeba. I remember asking the doctor if I would really survive all that dose of medicine. He had to stretch the medication for a long time to minimise the side effects. My children forced me to stay with them in Bahir Dar so that I could finish the medicines and make a full recovery. I did and got well soon, but when I came back home, all I could find was water straight from the lake. Back to square one.”

Man after man, woman after woman, they speak so openly about how bad their clothes smell after being washed in the lake, about how loud a noise their stomach makes because of the parasites they live with or what their excreta looks like. These are issues to do with dignity, not just access to services, but their honesty and openness shows how much they are hurt past their pride.

Aba Mislene Abebe Ashetih is a 93-year-old man, well beyond the Ethiopian average life expectancy age of 59 years. He is the person that speaks for the village on many occasions – good and bad. He said, “If I see the clean water coming to my village, I don’t mind dying the next day because I would consider it as if I lived a full 100 years.”
Aba Mislene (pictured) has seen how the villagers’ quality of life has changed with the deterioration of the lake’s water. But it took an educated person to explain it in a way outsiders would understand.

The village administration manager, Adane Mesfin said, “It’s a village that was credited to have produced some of the country’s finest minds; doctors, professors, authors (the country’s first fiction writer was from here), but over the last decade, it’s changing for the bad. A Spanish scientist just concluded her studies in our village in which I was actively involved. Forty-six children out of the tested 48 in our school were diagnosed with one or other type of parasite. She explained to us how the parasites are affecting their ability to concentrate and do well at school. We are no longer able to raise healthy children who will grow up with sound brain to be ‘somebodies’.”

Residents and authorities explained how the countless resorts built around the lake, the increasing waste disposal from the hospital (which is also by the lake) and fishing etc contributed to the contamination of their only source of water – the lake.

Belay Tamiru, the village’s political appointee, explained how women had used endod (soapberries) to wash clothes back in the day which killed the bilharzia, and how modern day dependence on soaps meant that bilharzia found a fertile ground for propagation. The theory of endod killing bilharzia is founded on scientific evidence thanks to Professor Aklilu Lemma’s groundbreaking research on the topic.

Belay was born and raised in Yiganda with a fishing experience spanning over 30 years. He said, “I have fished on this lake for more than 30 years. So I know what I am talking about when I tell you the fish I see today are not the fish I grew up fishing. Neither the look nor the taste is the same. The contamination is altering the nature of the fish; what reason do we have to not believe it’s not altering us?”

It’s a village full of people with wisdom and influence. They did not sit with their arms folded and wait for the bad water to kill them. They persuaded the government to send a rigging machine to dig deep wells. But the machine hit a very thick rock after digging 60 metres deep and concluded that there was no potential for economically viable underground water. In Ethiopia, a rigging machine costs a minimum of about 7,000 birr/metre, not counting the mobility costs especially in such disconnected areas. So when that operation failed, the amount of money wasted trying was too much to even try other spots.

WaterAid is well acquainted with such situations as it is always dedicated to reach out to the hard to reach. After careful analysis of the situation, WaterAid has now decided to bring water via a pipeline from a neighbouring village that has a reservoir with a 100,000 litre storage capacity. That village was also supported by WaterAid a couple of years ago which only makes the inter-village project an easy one.

 

Agegnehu Temesgen, 20, and her only son, Abreham, have suffered from lack of clean water in their village

A 20-year-old mother, Agegnehu Temesgen, described how helpless she feels to have to give unclean water to her only child knowing it’s going to make him sick. “But what choice do I have? Sometimes I just see him sick and wish it was me who was suffering from it. That is the only thing I can do, wish I was the one ill, not him.”

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah once wrote of how “We have in Africa the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance”. Yiganda seems to be suffering from it all.

This year, WaterAid will prove to the people of Yiganda that getting ill from unclean water should not be a normal part of a child’s growing up. This year, WaterAid will make history by bringing down clean water from the neighbouring monastery-village using gravity via pipes stretching almost 8.5 kilometres.

 

WaterAid/ Behailu Shiferaw