All About Water

Post by Lara

17 June 2013

Having just surpassed a year spent in Sierra Leone, I’m finally getting around to writing a post I meant to write sometime last June—this one is about water, in all the ways we encounter it here.  Please forgive any silly errors-- I may not have edited this post as well as others.

One of the first talks we got when we got off the plane in Freetown was about all the ways water could make us sick—specifically drinking untreated water.  We were provided with 1.5 L bottles of pure water immediately and reminded to only drink from these and refill them from provided filters.  One of the most difficult habits to get into was using bottled water to brush our teeth, and making sure not to swallow water that we showered with, since that is untreated.  Now after over a year in Salone, those little adjustments have become second-nature to us.

Here lies Nimbus resting behind our water filter.

The official talk on water safety taught us several interesting lessons: for instance, did you know that just about every pathogen in untreated water can be killed by boiling the water hard for just one minute? I think back to all the “boil water advisories” that went out when I lived in the states, where the CDC suggested you boil water for 10 minutes before using it, and I get a sense of the factors of safety surrounding our everyday lives in the good old US of A—here, boiling for 10 minutes is not only difficult, but it takes a lot of fuel—we’ve not had an issue with 1 minute of boiling thus far. 

Kevin buying "Binch Akara"

During our pre-service training and the first month or so that we were at site, Sierra Leone experienced a cholera outbreak that made it extra important to watch not only the water we drank but any foods we wanted to eat that may have been prepared with untreated water or exposed to flies and other disease-carriers.  Many yummy foods and drinks can have untreated water in or on them, such as sliced pineapple, ginger beer, frozen yogurt, popsicles, and pre-peeled cucumbers—we usually only eat those if we’ve prepared them ourselves.  Of course, any cooked food such as rice, “stews,” and the like are cooked long enough to kill anything that may have been lurking in the water.  Still, we  have to be careful because local cooks frequently use untreated water to rinse utensils and dishes before using them and to fluff rice and make balls out of cassava root, etc—so any food we didn’t make at home carries some risk with it. 

Beyond the risk of food-borne illnesses, water can play a role in some other illnesses as well.  First, fresh water in Africa—yes, any fresh water, even a puddle—can carry schistosomiasis, AKA blood flukes.  [For anyone who’s interested, check out the Radiolab episode on parasites. We loved it!] When we first learned this we were bound and determined to never swim or wade in fresh water in Africa, which we tried to do for a while, but it’s nigh impossible to survive rainy season in Sierra Leone without getting your feet wet, and it doesn’t really feel right asking our African companions to carry us over every giant puddle we come across.  Long story short, we’ve likely been exposed to schisto, and we are very happy that it’s PC policy to just go ahead and treat for it when we leave the country.

Much more common than blood flukes and thankfully also on the list of things Peace Corps protects us against is malaria, which is carried by mosquitoes, which need standing water to breed.  Guess how much standing water can be found during rainy season in Salone?  Answer: waaaaaay too much.  Kevin and I, though we take a malaria prophylaxis and are unlikely to get malaria ourselves, are on a constant crusade to rid our immediate surroundings of standing water (side note: mosquitoes LOVE me. They really do. So even if I’m never going to get malaria, I do my best to minimize the mosquito population in my environment so as to cut down on itchy annoyances).  This anti-standing-water campaign led Kevin to spend an afternoon not long ago digging a trench to drain the water from the pump we go to, and has also inspired us to work very hard at perfecting the gutter that runs behind our house—the faster 8 inches of water can disappear, the better! 

In addition to the standing water that pops up all over the place as the rains come more frequently, all water sources start to brim in August and sometimes don’t go down again until November or so.  The river that runs through our town becomes especially dangerous in the heaviest part of rainy season, and people drown here every year—even though many of them are experienced swimmers.  When the river is at its peak, the ferry that crosses it cannot run, and the only way to cross at our crossing is to hop into a dugout canoe, cross your fingers, and slowly make your way across by first traveling upstream a few hundred yards and then cutting over as the current carries you back downstream to the crossing.  It’s mildly terrifying, in case anyone is wondering.  On the flip side of that coin, in the driest of the dry season while the ferry is making its runs, many wells dry up at least for a time, and people have to travel further and/or resort to using not-as-clean water for their household needs. A colleague of ours had no water in her village for the better part of a month, and learned all sorts of techniques such as saving the water that she rinsed with in a big bucket and using that water to wash her dishes later.  This may seem a bit unsanitary, but when it comes to conserving water so you can drink and cook and wash yourself daily, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

Of course rainy season has its upsides too—for one, we can set our buckets out under the roof and watch them fill up in no time at all rather than having to walk 100 yards down the hill and back up again with full buckets; and two, rain tends to lower the temperature a bit, which is lovely because it is freaking hot in this country.  Outside of the heaviest few weeks of rainy season, we tend to make at least one trip a day to the water tap down the hill, and carry two 5-gallon buckets back up to the house for cooking, drinking, bathing, laundering, and all our household chores.  It probably goes without saying that Kevin and I are both buff as all get-out now that we’ve been doing that for nearly a year. 

Water is a really interesting aspect of life in Salone, because whether it’s scarce or plentiful it can be a problem (I want you to know that it’s incredibly difficult to resist the urge to throw in a Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference here).  Another challenge we face as foreigners living in Salone is the poor health education surrounding water and proper food-preparation techniques among our local friends and neighbors here.  We do our best to educate and sensitize those that we interact with, but cholera still exists and is still making Sierra Leoneans sick, so we have more work to do on that front. 

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