As water use falls in Front Range, it explodes elsewhere in Colorado
Colorado Front Range residents are using less water, but some parts of the Western Slope have seen per capita water use explode in the past decade, according to a new state study.
Environmentalists oppose Denver project to divert more water from Western Slope
Denver has hit turbulence in its biggest water-supply project since the 1960s — a $225 million effort to prevent future shortages. Denver Water proposes to divert enough for 45,000 families from mountain rivers on the western side of the Continental Divide, then pump it through tunnels to Front Range reservoirs, including an expanded Gross Reservoir above Boulder. But the plan requires federal approval, and at public hearings, opponents concerned about environmental harm have argued that Denver must rely more on using less water — not pump more from the mountains.
Colorado issues well permits despite declining groundwater
State water stewards have continued to permit groundwater pumping south of Denver, despite data and near universal agreement that underground water levels are falling and the resource is being depleted.
Reservoir under construction south of Denver, but there’s no water to hold
An armada of giant yellow earthmovers on the prairie south of Denver is racing to dig one of Colorado’s biggest water-supply reservoirs in decades — a hole 180 feet deep across 1,400 acres — designed to wean suburbs off waning aquifers. But the water to fill this reservoir? Not yet secured. The prospect of what critics call an empty bathtub is generating anxiety around Colorado as water managers clash over the last unclaimed mountain river flows.
Thirsty cities eye Wyoming water
A project once considered far-fetched — piping water from western Wyoming across the Continental Divide to Colorado’s booming Front Range cities — is getting a renewed look.
Colorado officials unleash beetles to battle water-sucking weed
Colorado agriculture officials are widening their battle against the West’s most voracious invasive weed, tamarisk, by deploying a controversial leaf-eating Chinese beetle east of the Continental Divide. As national expenditures in a decade-old campaign to combat invasive species top $1.3 billion a year, proponents see these beetles as cost-saving gems.
But there are concerns. The Diorhabdas may threaten an endangered bird, the southwestern willow flycatcher, which uses tamarisk in New Mexico and Arizona for nesting. The federal government recently was forced by a lawsuit to suspend its releases of Diorhabda beetles in eight Western states — where tamarisk has gobbled more than 1.5 million riparian acres.
Yet Colorado biologists contend the beetle is relatively benign and are pressing ahead — determined to suppress tamarisk with fight-the-enemy-with-its-enemy tactics that so far have proved successful.
Africa Lifelines: Peace Through Empowerment
Muramba, Rwanda - Thunderclouds rolled in from Congo across Rwanda’s red-and-green checkerboard hills, newly planted with corn.
At the Muramba girls high school, students in prim blue skirts
flocked from concrete classrooms to the cafeteria and bowed their heads
over books. Periodic tables. Algebra. English. Anything to get
ahead.
Here in 1997, men with machetes slaughtered 17 schoolgirls who refused their command to separate into Hutu and Tutsi tribal groups - one episode in the violence killing millions around Africa.
Musing in a patch of sunlight outside the cafeteria, Sister Marie
Donata, ever protective, tried to remain optimistic.
A private Colorado-based group, Engineers Without Borders, is
trying through small-scale power and water projects to encourage
Donata’s girls and 25,000 surrounding villagers to avoid conflict
and violence by improving living conditions. The engineers are
installing solar panels, for example, like the one that provides
the electricity lighting the cafeteria.
Still, Donata winced. She looked at the hills where barefoot
families on overcrowded land compete for space to grow enough food
and eke out an existence, while militias in neighboring Congo keep
killing.
“If the poverty is not reduced,” said Donata, 47, who lost
relatives in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, “it will happen again.”
Everywhere, memories gnaw. Villagers veer between normalcy and
torment.
“I remember my mother was killed when she was holding me,”
Monique Kubwumukiza, 11, said quietly, fidgeting with her feet and
hugging her sides. That happened in 1998, when Monique was 4.
“They were chopping her eyes and teeth. She died a very painful
death.”
After the men killed her mother, Monique ran to an aunt. Then the
men killed the aunt.
Now, as a fourth-grader, Monique writes and draws neatly but seldom
speaks. She refuses to eat, other than nibbling at nuts and corn.
“I’m afraid people will come and kill us,” she said. “So now I
am always telling my brothers and sisters we should not sleep in
the house. We should go sleep in the forest.”
Frances Feeney of Denver was amazed when she visited Muramba in
2003 and saw that villagers had begun self-help projects, producing
soap and honey, weaving mats, hammering furniture. Back in Denver,
Feeney shared what she’d seen with Bernard Amadei, a civil engineer
at the University of Colorado in Boulder who in 2001 founded
Engineers Without Borders USA.
Amadei embraced the challenge of helping villagers whose world
seemed intolerably out of balance. “What is good and bad there? …
We need to empower them with healthy ways of expressing their
creativity.”
Donated medical supplies for Rwanda from another Colorado- based
group, Project Cure, helped win support from Rwanda’s government
for work at Muramba, located in rugged country near volcanoes.
President Paul Kagame visited Denver last year as part of a tour
commemorating Rwanda’s genocide. His government plans to fix the
road so that cars can reach Muramba.
“Small projects that are well thought out and appropriate for
communities can go a long way,” Amadei said. “This decentralized
assistance will solve problems. There’s no corruption involved. The
philosophy of Engineers Without Borders is to be small, under the
radar screen, a stealth approach to international development.”
At headquarters in Longmont, the engineers’ project manager, Meg
VanSciver, fields proposals from villagers all over Africa. The
group relies on private donations of about $500,000 a year.
E-mail and cellphones open new possibilities for villagers to
bypass governments and get help, said VanSciver, a former Peace
Corps worker.
In Muramba, Sister Donata’s colleague, the Rev. John Bosco, 38, a
missionary from Uganda, hustles from project to project.
At one stop, a woman knew the neighbor who slit her husband’s
throat in the genocide. She’d worked out peace with this man.
Now, she wanted to know what she should do at the government- run
“gacaca” - grassroots - public tribunals that began in the area
this year. The tribunals are meant to encourage reconciliation in
villages. She is required to attend and publicly accuse the man of
killing her husband. She worried that this could only bring trouble
to her and her children.
“What would you say to her?” Bosco said.
Then he hurried to a meeting with HIV-infected villagers jockeying
for dwindling sacks of emergency-relief corn meal, and to a
vocational school where a new solar panel from Colorado powers
computers in an administrative office. Farmer Winceslas
Muhawenimana, 40, a father of six who had formed a work crew, was
hoisting rocks and plunging a pick into a steep hillside to clear a
foundation for a new furniture workshop at the school.
An orphan, Pascal, 14, tugged at Bosco’s leg. Pascal lived alone in
a crumbling dirt-floor hut with his brother, Evarist, 7, who had
contracted HIV from their mother before she died in 2001. Their
father died in the war.
“I can’t go home; there’s no food,” Pascal said. Bosco promised
he would visit him later, and went to Pascal’s hut at dusk.
He found Pascal sitting alone in the darkness on a donated gray
blanket amid the fetid, muddy smell of feces. “A wildcat ate my
rabbits,” a distraught Pascal said.
Bosco had given him a pregnant female rabbit to raise in hopes the
boy might earn money for corn by selling rabbits. Villagers here
love rabbit meat.
When Pascal came home from school, he found the hut empty. He
searched banana groves nearby. In one, he found a feral cat chewing
the rabbit’s carcass.
Seemingly endless daily setbacks like this crush hopes. But village
elders say practical help from Americans inspires them.
“We have so many problems,” said Alphonse Nsangirana, 48, a
father of seven working with fellow farmers on a hillside to fire
red clay roof tiles in a homemade kiln.
He pointed at a newly dug ditch where visiting engineers told him
water pipes would be installed. Then, Nsangirana and families here
could drink safe water from a tap.
“If these projects are well done, and people get benefits of light
and water, there’s no doubt, there will be peace and joy,”
Nsangirana said.
“What’s missing is money,” Donata said. Sustained self-help
projects would mean “many who are frustrated could find a job and,
instead of fighting, resolve conflicts” over land.
That would help students study. And students “who pass exams can
help resolve conflicts all over our country,” she said.
Donata’s schoolgirls worked diligently to this end as she spoke.
The visiting Americans are friends who “help us to have a good
life,” said Pamela Iliza Turatsinze, 16. “We will be the future
ministers, presidents and engineers.”
Beside her, Angelique Tnyishime, 18, added: “If those engineers
keep helping us, we will make it to the university. We will graduate
into positions where we can begin to help these poor people.”
——————————————–
HOW TO HELP
Here’s how to contact aid organizations whose work in Africa is reported on in the “Africa Lifelines” series:
SUNDAY / TANZANIA
Lundy Foundation
300 W. 11th Ave., Suite 15B
Denver, CO 80204
Web: www.lundy-africa.org
E-mail: v.dukay@att.net
Phone: 303-825-0888, ext. 3
Fax: 303-595-8925
Africa Bridge
P.O. Box 115
Marylhurst, OR 97036-0115
Web: www.africabridge.org
E-mail: africabridge@yahoo.com
Phone: 503-557-7245
Monday / Malawi
Water for People
6666 W. Quincy Ave.
Denver, CO 80235
Web: www.waterforpeople.org
E-mail: swerner@waterforpeople.org
Phone: 303-734-3490
Fax: 303-734-3499
TODAY / RWANDA
Engineers Without Borders - USA
1880 Industrial Circle, Suite B-3
Longmont, CO 80501
Web: www.ewb-usa.org
E-mail: Projects@ewb-usa.org
Phone: 303-772-2723
Fax: 303-772-2699
———————————-
SERIES TEAM
Series reporter: Bruce Finley covers international affairs and
security for The Denver Post, which he joined in 1988. He has
reported from more than 30 nations, including his third tour in
Iraq with a U.S. combat unit earlier this year. This is Finley’s
fifth Africa assignment.
He grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford University in 1984
and earned master’s degrees in international relations as a
Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at NorthwesternUniversity.
Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
Series photographer: Helen H. Richardson previously traveled to
Thailand and Indonesia to cover the South Asian tsunami and to Rome
for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, among other overseas
assignments for The Post, which she joined in 1993. Her freelance
work has appeared in The New York Times and Christian Science
Monitor.
Richardson grew up in Aspen and graduated from Parsons School of
Design in New York.
Richardson can be reached at hrichardson@denverpost.com
Series editor: Mark Harden
Photo editor: Larry C. Price
Copy editor: Eddie Chuculate
Maps and graphics: Severiano Galván
Multimedia producers: Doug Conarroe, Demetria Gallegos
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Some quoted material in these reports was translated from Swahili,
Tambuka, Kinyarwanda and local dialects.
Africa Lifelines: Water, Stuff of Life, Death
Africa Lifelines: A THREE-DAY SERIES
Engucwini, Malawi - Five times a day, Agnes Munthali hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head. Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
But water needs gnaw most urgently here and across rural Africa,
where 303 million villagers lack access to a safe source.
Waterborne disease kills thousands every day.
Munthali and others carry the buckets, weighing up to 45 pounds,
using bone, muscle and sheer will, while the gray Zombwe Mountains
loom in the distance.
On a recent clear morning, Munthali, a vivacious 35-year-old whose
smile reveals a missing front tooth, shrieked with laughter at an
outsider’s suggestion that the government will address water woes.
For villagers, government “doesn’t work,” Munthali said.
Villagers can’t even approach politicians, she said. If one did,
politicians “would turn him down.”
As it is, Munthali and her water- carrying neighbors consider
themselves lucky.
For the first time in years, the water they haul is clean - not
because Malawi’s government helped, but because Engucwini connected
with a private group of Americans half a world away.
The villagers teamed up with Water for People, a Denver-based group
that funds self-help projects. This year, the group arranged for
installation of a 150-foot-deep well within a mile of Munthali’s
mud-brick hut.
“I’m very happy about this,” she said.
More than 2,000 villagers a day flock to this well for clean water.
Previously, they had no choice but to drink contaminated water from
hand-dug pits.
Americans may assume the world’s poorest people suffer silently,
but more and more are able to ask for help using cellphones, e-mail
and other connections, circumventing corrupt or cumbersome
governments, said Solomon Nkiwane, a Zimbabwean political scientist
at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Villagers increasingly form committees and pursue their interests
anywhere they can find help, Nkiwane said.
“This people-to-people thing is beginning. It may be a drop in the
bucket. But maybe this is the approach we should take,” he said.
Malawian life expectancy has fallen from 42 years in the 1970s to
39 in recent years because of AIDS and diseases caused by
contaminated water. And income is falling. Farmers in this area
earn about $8 a month.
The project began a few years ago when the local doctor, Steven
Chavinda, 65, called chiefs together and asked: “What are your
greatest needs?” All the chiefs said the same thing: clean water.
One chief, Mishek Ndzima, had lost his son to cholera, spread by
feces in water.
Chavinda told a U.S. Peace Corps worker posted nearby, who informed
a Malawian who worked as regional coordinator for Water for People.
That led to installation over the past 18 months of two wells at a
cost of $25,000. Denver-based supervisors lined up a local crew to
drill the holes and oversee maintenance training.
“The best solutions come from sitting down as close to the problem
as possible and talking with the people,” said Steve Werner,
executive director of Water for People, at his headquarters in
Denver.
Villagers worldwide propose dozens of projects each month, often
learning of the group through the Internet. Werner and 20 staffers
in five countries review all proposals. Sponsored by the American
Waterworks Association trade group, they fund what they can on an
annual budget of around $2.8 million: about 80 projects, including
40 wells from Bolivia to Vietnam.
In Malawi, the first of the two wells helped revive the local
health clinic. The clinic, built in 1984, for years offered only
limited services because of a lack of water. Government officials
never supplied medicine as they do at other rural clinics. Radios
for emergency communications weren’t maintained. A 10-bed maternity
wing never opened.
This year, villagers notified health officials that the clinic has
water from a foreign-funded well with a solar-powered pump. And
health-ministry crews delivered mattresses for maternity beds, said
Manford Nyirenda, 49, chairman of the village water committee.
“We pushed them into action,” Nyirenda said, smiling, finger on
the pump power switch.
At the other well, Munthali gripped a hand pump and pushed up and
down as the noon sun beat down. Clear water gushed from the tap.
Women and girls took turns filling blue and orange buckets,
chattering. Between buckets, girls jockeyed to drink from the tap,
including Munthali’s pride and joy, Memory, 8, in a torn red
dress.
Last year, Memory got sick after drinking contaminated water from a
shallow well. “Very bad for her,” Munthali said. Purifying water
by boiling was impractical, given limited wood in the area.
Most of the 18,000 villagers around Engucwini still rely on water
drawn from hand-dug pits. Cloudy, stagnant pools in the pits
contain bacteria that cause cholera and diarrhea, known locally as
“open bowels.”
Malarial mosquitoes breed in mud around the pools. Women wash
clothes close by.
At the health clinic, the doctor Chavinda recently faced Ester
Chiumia, 32, cradling her dehydrated month-old son, Samuel. She had
walked since sunrise to reach Chavinda in his concrete building
without electricity. Now it was noon.
Gazing down at her baby, Chiumia said Samuel had bloody diarrhea
and no appetite.
Chavinda looked at her silently at first. At that moment, he lacked
the right medication. He saw Chiumia practically shaking with fear.
He gave her a folded piece of paper containing a couple tablets of
an adult antibiotic - the closest substitute he could find - with
instructions to cut each pill in half.
Chiumia nodded, still worried. She told the doctor the water she
hauls “looks dark. … We have no choice.”
At least 150 villagers die around Engucwini each year from easily
preventable sickness from contaminated water, Chavinda said. Deaths
decreased a bit recently in the area around Engucwini’s two new
wells, he said, “but we’ve got a lot more work to do.” He
reckoned Engucwini needs at least 20 wells.
Today, girls skip school to join the stoic parade of women hauling
water. And mothers are resigned that contaminated water will kill
kids.
“We do take chances here,” one woman said, watching her
granddaughter, Tiyese Chirwa, climb down a log into a muddy pit and
dip her bucket into a plate-sized milky pool of water.
Some villagers here struggle to find water at all. At an outlying
area called Chileda, there are no wells within 5 miles for an
estimated 5,000 people. For them, even marginal water is precious.
Barefoot boys in raggedy clothes were there, some with bellies
bloated from malnourishment, crouched around a drying water hole.
They had been digging it out a bit trying to coax more water from
the ground. A saucer-sized cloudy white pool of water only grew
more opaque.
Desperate, Chileda chiefs recently dispatched Frank Kumwenda, 29,
to go to the regional capital, Mzuzu, for help.
He set out by bicycle at 4 a.m., bouncing down a dirt road. He
pedaled furiously, crossed the sewage-contaminated Kasitu River
before anybody was up and reached the pavement of Malawi’s main
north-south road.
Then, moving along faster, he noticed some roadside villages had
wells. “I compared them to us,” Kumwenda said. “We are still
behind.”
Kumwenda drank from one well, savoring the water on his journey.
He reached Mzuzu and its government offices by 9 a.m.
“I found the secretary,” Kumwenda said.
He announced that he had come to get help for his village.
“The secretary said, ‘The boss is not in the office,”‘ he said.
When he rode home that afternoon after a fruitless wait and told
what had happened, the chiefs were angry.
Kumwenda planned to try again soon.
Meanwhile, Munthali, sitting with relatives at their tidy farm
compound, said she wants to be part of a local maintenance team to
make sure the new wells work properly.
Men had assumed they would travel for maintenance training, but
Munthali said, “We’ll need a good mix.” After all, women haul
most of the water.
And while acknowledging the pressing needs of villagers at Chileda,
she also proposed drilling a new well closer to her home.
Today, even with a clean water source a half mile away, she and
Memory still must devote much of each day to trekking back and
forth.
In America, “people have a much easier life,” Munthali said.
“How can that happen here?”
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Africa Lifelines: Orphaned by AIDS…Embraced by Strangers
Idweli, Tanzania - From the back of a lantern-lit schoolroom at a rural orphanage, Fodi Julius fixed his shining eyes on the blackboard. He was fighting exhaustion and trying to please his parents.
They died three years ago, leaving Fodi, 11, and his brother,
Nhambo, 8, among Africa’s 12.3 million children who’ve lost parents
to AIDS.
Their mom and dad’s final advice: Do well in school, because
survival depends on it.
Before moving to the orphanage, Fodi and Nhambo rose each morning
from their mats by a fire pit in their crumbling mud-brick hut.
They straightened their smudged school uniforms. Their small
fingers wove grass in place of lost buttons to fasten tattered
shirts.
The boys set out barefoot and without breakfast down the dirt path
to school. At lunch break, while others ate, they waited. Finally,
when the teacher dismissed them for the day, Fodi and Nhambo
wandered through farm fields, foraging for food.
“We’d get leaves,” Fodi said. He weighs 48 pounds, half the
weight of others his age.
He mixed those green leaves with water and urged Nhambo to eat, no
matter how bad the leaves tasted or how sad he felt.
“I’d just tell him: ‘She died. There’s nothing we can do about
it.’ I’d tell him: ‘Even if you cry, she’s not coming back. So we
should stop crying and do what we have to do.”‘
But now, after three years on their own, Fodi and Nhambo have beds,
meals and basic instruction at an experimental children’s center
where they live with 56 other orphans on the outskirts of this
dusty, Swahili-speaking village.
Americans half a world away in Colorado and Oregon set up the
center - stepping in where governments and big charities had done
nothing.
As the world grows more intertwined, African villagers mired in
disease, poverty and conflict - and those who want to help them -
are discovering new ways to connect, bypassing Africa’s
corruption-crippled governments and Western bureaucrats.
Television, radio and reports from migrant sons and daughters have
whetted village appetites for better living conditions. The recent
arrival of cellphones and e-mail in rural hubs encourages direct
links with Americans.
Help began with an e-mail
Here at Idweli, whose 1,300 people include more than 200 orphans,
the children’s center where Fodi now finds full plates of rice and
potatoes began with a simple e-mail.
Godfrey Mahenge, a student from Idweli studying medicine in
Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, five years ago vowed to do
something to help orphans back home. He’d told elders of his plans.
They’d dismissed him as a dreamer.
Mahenge drowned five years ago while swimming in the ocean. But his
girlfriend, Neema Mgana, kept sending e-mail queries to groups
outside Africa. One e-mail reached Barry Childs, 61, a corporate
executive turned philanthropist in Oregon who’d formed the group
Africa Bridge to try to help villagers.
Instead of dismissing the message as just another African e-mail
scam, Childs asked for details. He paid for Mgana to visit him.
Childs enlisted Vic Dukay, 49, a former aviation-business owner in
Denver with experience running AIDS projects, to work with him at
Idweli. Their first visits in 2002 focused on listening to children
and village elders.
“You want to be useful,” said Dukay, a heavyset, jovial man prone
to overworking himself. Orphaned at age 15, he was later moved to
tears as he sat with kids unsure where they’d find their next meal
and who habitually raised their hands before speaking.
“It took me back instantly to when I was 15,” he said. “That
look in the eye, body language, speech, that low, soft voice,
wanting to be in the back of the room away from everybody, not
wanting to be seen. You look in their eyes. Have you ever seen
anybody really sad? I can see sadness in somebody’s eyes. …
Probably from looking at myself.”
Dukay and Childs guided construction of the center, five ochre-hued
buildings with cement-and-stone foundations. Village men did the
work. There’s no electricity or running water.
This year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dukay a grant to
assess whether the children’s center is meeting village needs. He
led an evaluation team, including psychologists and social workers,
on his 10th visit to Idweli this fall - feeling “more alive than
I’ve ever felt,” he said.
Staving off extremists
Sustaining this children’s center, and possibly replicating it
elsewhere, is more than a humanitarian effort, Dukay said. Security
analysts worry that Africa’s millions of desperate AIDS orphans
will join jobless urban masses adrift and vulnerable to extremists
who could lure them into violence.
“Where best to recruit?” Dukay said. “Out here in the
hinterlands where there is no security.”
He watched Fodi playing soccer in donated white sneakers, fighting
hard for the ball against bigger players, despite his physical
weakness after three years of eating very little. Nhambo, solitary
and silent, played a bit, too.
Any chore, Fodi volunteered. He hauled a 16-foot-long bamboo pole
for a mile to help cooks who were building a shelf.
Life’s better now than before, Fodi said, recalling how taunts from
children with parents tormented him.
“I’d leave, go sit someplace alone. Very bad to hear. I thought:
‘This will happen many times in my life. People will always be
telling me I am an orphan.”‘
Far more typical across Africa today are orphaned children who
raise other children with no help. Village elders are overwhelmed.
Nearby at the village of Ndulamo, three teenage girls - Shida
Mahenge, 16, and her sisters, Ona, 14, and Rehema, 12 - huddled
together at sunset. When they beg for food from neighbors, “people
cannot give,” Shida said.
For five years after AIDS killed their father and then their
mother, Shida served as surrogate parent and caretaker, insisting
that Ona and Rehema stay in school.
“I’m always telling them they need to behave and to listen to
their teacher and when they don’t understand, to ask questions,”
she said.
She deals with food. Working to earn money means enduring
harassment from boys and men unaccustomed to working with a girl.
First, Shida broke rock into gravel that villagers sell to road
crews for maintenance.
“Very hard work. You have to carry the rocks. It takes a long time
with the hammer to break the rocks into small stones. Now, I work
carrying timber. I think it might be better.”
But this night they had no food or wood to burn and stay warm. The
girls huddled silently in the cold, blue darkness. They were
hungry, barely able to think about their dreams of attending a
vocational school.
“We like to pray,” Shida said. “We have a very hard life now. We
pray to God to help us, so that we will not get sick. … We need
help to survive.”
HIV adds to struggles
Helping children such as this can be difficult because many are
infected with HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Doctors are scarce,
about one per 50,000 people in rural Tanzania, let alone anti-retroviral drugs for villagers.
At a German-run clinic nearby in Bolongwa, Dr. Rainer Brandl was
amazed to see a tiny, bloated girl, her feet swollen, staggering in
from a farm.
When he tested Veneranda Ganga, 13, he found she was HIV-positive with virtually no immunities. Doubting she’d survive,
Brandl put her on anti-retrovirals.
Veneranda gained strength. She began helping around the hospital,
cradling an abandoned 1-year-old girl. She told nurses she’d been
sick for years, after her father died of AIDS. Later, her mother
died, too, when Veneranda was 5. Before dying, she said, her mother
told her: “You must listen to other people. One day I will die,
and you must get along.”
Each day Veneranda retrieved water, washed dishes and took care of
her brother and an aunt’s two young children. This year, she grew
too weak to work. “I told my uncle, I better go to the
hospital.”
Frustrated and deluged with sick children, Brandl works on a
shoestring, unable to pay and keep staff. United Nations and U.S.
aid often funds workshops for doctors and social workers in cities,
drawing them away from urgent work in villages, he said.
“Nobody wants to work out here,” he said.
Orphans start to cope
At the Idweli children’s center, regular meals, chores and classes
let orphans begin coming to terms with their plight.
Vaileti Bonifasi, 14, who was 2 when her parents died, said she’d
been sneaking away to visit their graves, praying a bit, talking
and crying.
“I was walking back home from school thinking: ‘How can I not even
know what my mother looked like?”‘ Vaileti said. “I thought about
it all the way home. And I was lying on my bed. When I got up, the
ghost of my mother came to me. She was speaking to me. But I
couldn’t understand her.”
Godfrey Mahenge’s younger brother Elia, 21, told Vaileti she should
ask her brother Fred at the family house by the graves if he had a
photo of their mother. When they arrived, they found Fred standing
with his wife, Gloria, and their baby.
“There’s no picture” of their mother, Fred said. Instead, Fred
produced a wrinkled, laminated driver’s license showing their
father, who died in 1994. Vaileti clutched it but still wanted a
photo of her mother.
“I need to compare it with the face of the ghost,” she said.
Involving the villagers
The cost of the project at Idweli, including construction and
support for daily operations, has been about $300,000. Now Dukay’s
evaluation is focused on perceptions of villagers and the
children.
“Are there any concerns?” Dukay asked recently in the meeting
hall, addressing village elders. “If there are any problems in
what we are doing, I would like to know directly.”
Some villagers benefit - such as Florence Doset, 39, a mother of
two who teaches at the center. She earns $50 a month.
“Because of these children, we have money,” she said. “So we’re
happy.”
Others are bewildered. Orphans at the center suddenly enjoy better
living conditions and food than other children living with their
parents. Project supporters have begun to give small
“microcredit” loans to villagers.
Fodi is now studying as his parents advised, but the habit of
worrying about Nhambo is ingrained. He recently warned Elia that
Nhambo’s mind wanders in school.
But Fodi also was beginning to think about himself. In the
classroom where he sat recently in the early evening, he summoned
the last energy he had to hold his head up. Three lanterns cast a
golden light just bright enough to illuminate the blackboard. Elia
was teaching English, writing sentences - “You sing a song” - for
students to copy.
This was extra instruction to give the orphans a better chance at
school. Twenty boys, mostly older, were taking advantage.
And Fodi was especially resolute.
He wanted to be ready for competitive tests that determine who
qualifies for college.
“I want to be a teacher,” Fodi said. “Then I can help other
people.”
———————————-
SERIES TEAM
Series reporter: Bruce Finley covers international affairs and
security for The Denver Post, which he joined in 1988. He has
reported from more than 30 nations, including his third tour in
Iraq with a U.S. combat unit earlier this year. This is Finley’s
fifth Africa assignment.
He grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford University in 1984
and earned master’s degrees in international relations as a
Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at NorthwesternUniversity.
Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
Series photographer: Helen H. Richardson previously traveled to
Thailand and Indonesia to cover the South Asian tsunami and to Rome
for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, among other overseas
assignments for The Post, which she joined in 1993. Her freelance
work has appeared in The New York Times and Christian Science
Monitor.
Richardson grew up in Aspen and graduated from Parsons School of
Design in New York.
Richardson can be reached at hrichardson@denverpost.com
Series editor: Mark Harden
Photo editor: Larry C. Price
Copy editor: Eddie Chuculate
Maps and graphics: Severiano Galván
Multimedia producers: Doug Conarroe, Demetria Gallegos
———————————–
THE SERIES
Cellphones, e-mail and migrants are connecting rural Africa with
urban America, creating new possibilities for action to address
Africa’s pressing problems. Private groups in Colorado and
elsewhere are reaching the villages where two-thirds of Africans
live. “Africa Lifelines,” a three-day Denver Post series,
explores these efforts.
Today: A Coloradan works in a Tanzanian village where the spread of
AIDS is leaving growing numbers of children parentless.
Also, a Denver FBI agent cultivates African police as partners
against terrorism.
Monday: Efforts by Colorado-based Water for People to drill wells in Malawi help
thousands who search daily for safe water.
Tuesday: Colorado engineers assist Rwandan schoolgirls quavering
from the horrors of war.
Some quoted material in these reports was translated from Swahili,
Tambuka, Kinyarwanda and local dialects.
Dying For Clean Water
As many as one-fifth of the world’s people lack safe water - and 6,000 children are dying every day as a result. But developed nations and companies with know-how are doing less to help.
CANDELARIA, Honduras - Struggling for the water her family needs to
live, Maria Garcia hikes five times a day from her dirt-floor shack
to a creek. The creek - cloudy from pesticides and from villagers
bathing and washing clothes - isn’t safe. Her first son, Roni, died
of hepatitis at age 3 - one of an estimated 2 million children a
year worldwide who die from diseases linked to bad water. Now her
second son, 1-year-old Jose, “is always with diarrhea, always
coughing.” Still, Garcia, 23 years old and seven months’ pregnant,
has no choice. This is the only water she can get.
She scoops the creek water into her red jug. She hoists this
40-pound load onto her back and, stretching rattan cords across her
forehead to support it, claws her way up a slippery clay slope on
the quarter-mile haul home.
“It’s hard to do without falling,” she says. “I’m going to have
to do more trips. I’m going to need the water.”
Today, nobody is moving to help Garcia and the growing numbers of
people - an estimated 1.1 billion, nearly a fifth of humanity - who
lack safe water. Twice that many lack basic sanitation.
The death toll from bad water mounts. United Nations officials say
it tops 6,000 children a day - mostly in low-income Africa, Asia
and Latin America.
Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases that can
lead to fatal dehydration. Most common is diarrhea - easily
preventable in developed nations such as the United States.
But elsewhere, solutions are constrained by spreading poverty and
increasingly limited water resources.
Water shortages and deficient sanitation now are starting to
aggravate conflicts, leading to political turmoil. Three years ago
in Bolivia, slum dwellers rioted when the government tried to
install a water system that required them to pay fees they found
intolerable. International bankers would only back a for-pay
system.
And last month, Bolivian peasants and slum dwellers, riled about
their government’s free-market policies in general, marched on
Bolivia’s capital, hurling dynamite. They forced President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada to resign.
“We could have water wars - not riots, I mean wars - between
countries over control of river systems,” said Andrew Natsios,
chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the
nation’s main humanitarian agency. “We are very worried about
that.”
World aid agencies doing less
In Iraq this year, a sudden collapse of water-supply networks
enraged Iraqis as U.S. troops, who had bottled water, occupied
their communities. In India, a dispute over water allocations has
led to interstate rioting. In China, an estimated 100 million
peasants unable to irrigate crops converge on ill-equipped cities.
In the Middle East, a behind-the-scenes struggle for water strains
efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Water shortages also are expected to spur migration from water-poor
regions to Europe and the United States, where jobs and water are
plentiful.
Many experts believe that a concerted effort to address global
water supply and sanitation should be a priority for the United
States and other wealthy countries. U.S. government studies have
found that installing a basic water system in a village can cut
infant mortality by up to 50 percent.
Yet the governments and corporations that could help instead are
withdrawing from the challenge instead.
Government water aid from 21 of the richest countries to poor
countries decreased by 18 percent between 1997 and 2001, according
to data compiled by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development, an international group based in Paris.
The U.S. government - focusing on military priorities this year -
budgeted only $162 million for water-supply and sanitation help
abroad.
USAID’s Natsios said this will change. The United States will
follow through on a presidential “Water For the Poor” initiative
to spend $970 million over three years “to deal with these
issues,” he said. That money - a third of it approved so far by
Congress - falls far short of the tens of billions U.N. leaders say
are needed.
The other key players in addressing water shortages and poor
sanitation are corporations that can design and install efficient
systems. They, too, are doing less. Private-sector spending on
water supply and sanitation decreased by 82 percent between 1997
and 2002, from $8.3 billion to $1.5 billion, according to data from
the World Bank, the main international financing agency.
Engineering, construction and utility firms aren’t motivated. As
the poor world gets poorer, the potential for profit diminishes.
Companies no longer bid on requests to install water systems even
in megacities - let alone in the villages where more than half the
world’s poor reside, said Don Evans, chief of water operations for
Denver-based CH2M Hill - one U.S. firm in a water industry
dominated by Europe- based conglomerates.
“The poor residents of these countries have no access to water.
They have incredible sanitation issues with huge health impacts,”
Evans said. “It’s a tragedy to these countries that nothing is
going to happen.”
‘It’s very hard to lose a son’
In Honduras, population 6.6 million, one of the poorest countries
in the world, water problems are chronically as severe as anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere. The struggle for clean water is constant
in villages such as Candelaria in the central highlands.
Here, amid screeching roosters and the hum of insects, Maria Garcia
enters her shack and unloads her sloshing jugs beneath rafters
where she stores maize, in the tradition of Lenca Indians,
descendants of the Mayans who once thrived across Central America.
A small fire smokes in the corner.
The only way to make the water safe - Garcia has heard from
visiting Cuban health workers - is to boil it.
But boiling water requires wood. The nearest forest lies 3 miles
away in the mountains - meaning a major chore for Reyes Gomez, 24,
her husband.
“We can’t get that much wood,” Garcia says. At the same time, she
believes that Roni died, and Jose is sick, because “we drink the
water without boiling it.”
The family tried to get help for Roni. Gomez carried the boy 13
miles down the muddy road to La Esperanza - the nearest city.
Doctors took blood and urine samples and sent Gomez and his son to
a regional hospital 60 miles across mountains in Comayagua.
There, nurses sent them back to La Esperanza. Gomez turned to a
private specialist who suggested a test for $147. Gomez sold the
family’s bull for $264 to pay for the test. The specialist
concluded Roni’s hepatitis was chronic. There was nothing to do.
Gomez carried his son home. Six nights later, on Dec. 28, as
parents and grandparents cradled him, Roni died.
“It’s very hard to lose a son,” Gomez said. “You want to kill
yourself.”
Doctors face similar cases every day.
More people worldwide enter hospitals with waterborne diseases than
with any other type of ailment, said Mark Brown, chief of the
United Nations Development Program. Lack of safe water ranks among
the leading causes of death. An estimated 2 million children a year
are victims of water-related diarrhea, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq
said. Typically, the diarrhea comes from swallowing fecal
bacteria.
In a dimly lit emergency ward along the northern coast of Honduras,
Dr. Marta Benitez said 40 percent of her patients are children sick
from foul water. It’s a bigger killer than the mosquito-borne
malaria and hemorrhagic dengue fever that also haunt Central
America.
During a recent night shift, Benitez and two nurses handled five
critical cases. One dehydrated boy, Daniel Ramos, 3, lay on a
gurney, eyes rolling as he drifted in and out of consciousness,
loops of white tape holding an intravenous tube on his tiny right
wrist.
“He’s always sick with diarrhea,” said his mother, Esperanza
Hernandez, 27. He’d been crying that his stomach hurt, and in the
middle of the night his family hustled down a rocky trail from
their village in foggy forests above banana plantations. “I was
worried he would pass out on the way to the hospital,” Hernandez
said.
The family drinks stream water. “We don’t boil the water,” said
Dolores Ramos, the boy’s grandmother, “because we don’t like the
taste of boiled water.”
Benitez told the parents to just wait. “With IV, I think he’ll
respond.” As they hung their heads, she added: “We could prevent
these.”
Polluted water hurts people in countless ways. Typhoid and cholera
flare regularly. Waterborne parasites cause onchocerciasis -
“river blindness.” Other parasites contribute to malnutrition.
And everywhere, girls give their lives to the chore of hauling
water for their families.
Miriam Garcia, 13, and her friends recently balanced 20-pound water
buckets on their heads along the Guaymitas River on the outskirts
of El Progresso, an industrial boomtown in northern Honduras. They
had to quit school after third grade.
“My mother doesn’t come to get water because her hip hurts, so I
am the only one who comes,” Garcia said.
The girls bathe, wash clothes and play in the river - within a mile
of family shanties. Diarrhea and headaches are the norm.
Doctors at public clinics “only pay attention to those who have
money,” Garcia said. “We all have parasites in our stomachs.”
Population growth erases gains
For three decades, leaders of rich countries have vowed to help the
world’s water have-nots.
The United Nations, which declared the 1980s “The Decade of
Water,” again has put water at the top of its global agenda. After
last year’s U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg, South Africa, U.N. leaders set a goal to halve the
proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and
sanitation by 2015.
Yet “the water situation worldwide is distressing and not
improving noticeably,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, president of the
Denver-based American Water Works Association, a leading group of
water professionals.
Part of the challenge is that deaths caused by contaminated water -
unlike deaths from earthquakes or hurricanes - are “a persistent,
growing problem,” said John Halpern, senior water supply and
sanitation adviser for the World Bank. Politically, it’s hard to
get governments to focus on such problems because they don’t seem
as urgent even if the consequences are huge, Halpern said.
And gains have been nullified by population growth in the most
severely afflicted countries across Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
Finally, lenders who could supply the billions needed for urban
water systems turn away because governments in poor countries often
can’t or won’t pay bills.
Meanwhile, villages like Candelaria - population 1,500 - are so
scattered that only small-scale solutions are feasible. Grassroots
nonprofit aid groups are the best hope for villagers, Halpern
said.
“The rich world needs to be involved. In pure economic terms,
growth in these countries is what’s going to help grow the world
economy. The industrialized countries including the United States
need somebody to sell goods and services to. Most of the population
lives in the developing world and will live increasingly in the
developing world.”
A debate among water experts also stalls action.
The issue is whether corporations should control water. In the
mid-1990s, corporations backed by the World Bank began installing
and operating water systems in needy countries - for profit, with
the view that charging for water is essential to allocate it
efficiently. People in rich countries generally pay for their
water, though rates often are lower than in poor countries where
water is scarce. Critics argue that water essential for life
shouldn’t be privately controlled.
“There has to be strong government oversight and protection of the
public good,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific
Institute, a water policy research center.
While the debate rages, children die. Anger grows.
“The U.S. response, in particular, has been inadequate. Our
contribution to water projects internationally is pathetically low.
It’s a tiny fraction of the aid we give, which itself is a tiny
fraction of what’s needed,” Gleick said.
“If this problem got the attention it deserves, we could eliminate
deaths from water-related diseases. But we seem to do better at
dealing with short-term crises. It’s more upsetting to us when a
plane crashes than when 6,000 kids died yesterday, and today, and
will die again tomorrow from preventable water-related diseases.”
For a few years, Honduras stood out among water-poor countries
because it did get some serious attention in 1998 following
Hurricane Mitch. The death and destruction - concentrated in the
north where U.S. corporations Chiquita and Dole for decades have
run banana plantations - drew more than $1 billion in emergency
aid. The United States gave more than $145 million.
Hurricane aid helped town
The aid paid for CH2M Hill, the Denver-based engineering firm, to
install $3 million worth of water supply and sanitation systems,
mostly in northern cities near the plantations and new factories.
Now in La Lima, population 70,000, healthy children play soccer
beneath red tanks that supply purified water.
The water immediately improved lives of thousands who lacked access
before, said caretaker Gilberto Nunez, 40, a father of two, who was
watering Llama del Bosque trees recently at the base of one tank.
“We don’t have the shortages we had before. People are really
satisfied,” Nunez said. “Before, they had to walk far and carry
their water. We were always working to get water.”
CH2M Hill sent engineer Leda Amador, who grew up in Honduras, to
coordinate work at the local level - including the delicate matter
of convincing low-income residents to pay for treated water piped
to their homes.
Incomes here, as across much of the world, are generally less than
$500 a year. And newcomers flocking from rural areas for factory
work often bristle at the notion of paying for water. Sometimes
they refuse.
“The question is whether the poor can pay,” Amador said. “I
think they can. If you figure what their other options are - what
they pay to buy water from private water trucks or to buy water in
bottles - it’s more than what they would pay for (municipal) water
service.”
Amador teamed with leaders of neighborhood “patronata” self-help
associations to explain plans. City officials backed her up,
cutting off service when people didn’t pay. Rates were set on a
sliding scale to help the poor. A typical family pays $7 a month.
But now Honduras’ hurricane money has run out. CH2M Hill is closing
its office. And, as in other poor countries, hundreds of thousands
of Hondurans - the population is growing by 3.2 percent a year -
still lack access to safe water.
The United States “must continue helping, because in poor
countries, we don’t have the capability to build up our water
systems because it’s too expensive,” said Mayor Nelly Soliman of
El Progresso, population 200,000. “Always, the policy has been,
the richer countries should help the poorer countries. This is a
severe problem for us.”
U.S. officials say the most children die in rural areas, where 36
percent of Hondurans lack water. “I’d like to put more in. It is
needed,” said Paul Tuebner, USAID’s director in Honduras.
“Have you ever hauled water daily for 2 miles on your head up and
down mountains? … We have studies that show, once we put in a water
system, infant mortality goes down.”
The anger that has led to riots over water has erupted here, too.
Last March, 1,500 protesters riled about water targeted roads in a
northern industrial area where they knew they might get attention.
They blocked traffic around new “maquila” factories where, for
about $50 a month, workers make Fruit of the Loom, Wrangler, Tommy
Hilfiger and other garments for U.S. consumers.But Honduras’ rural
poor traditionally are peaceful. And in Candelaria, villagers
preferred a practical approach.
They’ve designed a water system that would pipe water from a spring
to spigots at family compounds.
A few years ago, they bought pipes and laid them, with dozens of
men contributing free labor. But the pipes burst. Local engineers
had failed to allow for pressure changes as water whooshed up and
down hills. Now, with help from different engineers, village
leaders have modified their plan and are looking for a better kind
of pipe.
Some villagers are hopeful. Maria Garcia and Reyes Gomez are
impatient after their son’s death.
Gomez now plans to emigrate to the United States. Friends who have
managed to sneak into the country send home money that lets their
families live comfortably in La Esperanza.
Working abroad “would be harder. This is my father’s land. I
learned to grow crops from my father. This is the natural way for
me to earn my living,” Gomez said. But potato and banana crops
don’t pay. His wife, Maria, is too busy hauling water to work in a
sewing cooperative.
So Gomez talks of borrowing $1,300 to hire a smuggler to guide him
north. There are alligators in the river along the U.S.-Mexico
border, he said. “That’s what I’m scared of, and maybe somebody
will kill me.”
If he gets through, his first earnings will pay off his lender, he
said. “Then I could help my family.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
American Water Works Association (Based in Denver):
….www.awwa.org; 303-734-3410
….www.water4people.org; 303-734-3476; ….303-734-3494
World Vision, aid contacts in La Esperanza, Honduras:
….Cesar_zelaya@wvi.org
….Region_intibuca@wvi.org
….honduras@wvi.org
Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif.- based water research center
that publishes the biennial survey “The World’s Water”:
www.pacinst.org
USAID, a government humanitarian agency: www.usaid.gov
World Bank, an international finance organization:
www.worldbank.org
HONDURAS
Population: 6,669,789
Median age: 18.8 years
Population growth rate: 3.2 percent
Infant mortality rate: 29.96 deaths per 1,000 live births
Life expectancy at birth: 66.65 years
Fertility rate: 4.07 children born per woman (2003 estimate)
Literacy rate: 76.2 percent (those 15 and over who can read and
write)
Population below poverty line: 53 percent (1993 estimate)
Unemployment rate: 28 percent (2002 estimate)
Sources: Denver Post research,
CIA Factbook
For 20 years, journalist Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. A staff writer for 