50 km Out of Town

Sorry for the delay in updating. I think what has ended up happening is that instead of both Marlene and I updating frequently, we have started to take turns writing updates. For those of you who don’t know, Marlene’s blog can be found at http://katika-imani.blogspot.com.

This past week, we went farther for our focus group than anyone in the Stanford group here has gone from Bagamoyo. Fifty kilometers straight inland. We passed by Soko Jipya, Kimara Ngombe, Mtoni, and then drove onwards. We drove past Fukayosi, the farthest village in the Stanford Group study, and then finally arrived in Kiwangwa. To our surprise, the first thing we saw was a bustling street filled with dukas (small window shops), several bars, and a bunch of piki pikis (motorcycles) lined up. It looked like it could have been some of the more secluded areas of Bagamoyo town. Certainly not like the village I had pictured though there were telltale signs that life was definitely different here. On our drive into town, we saw people towing carts full of water jugs back into the village from somewhere else. It was unclear how far they actually had to travel for their water, but apparently it was far enough that they wanted to bring lots of containers on each trip. In our focus group we learned that there were no clean sources of water in the village. Most people drank from either surface water or very shallow wells. On top of that, no one treats their water. Boiling is too much effort when they are out farming pineapples all day and other forms of water treatment are too expensive. There were even some who believed that if you weren’t used to boiled water, then drinking it could give you diarrhea!

Many of the other comments we received were similar to those we heard in other communities, but this group was much more willing to explain the ideas thoroughly. Looking through the translation of the group we have really started to be able to understand some of the insights and it has started to make me think about the overarching goal of this study and the Stanford group study. What I continue to notice is that it is not that these women don’t know they should treat their water or cover their latrine. They simply don’t have the means necessary to do it. Oftentimes we think that those in poverty just don’t know as much as those of us in the “first world.” We think of them with an attitude that focuses on what we, the educated, can teach the poor people. It isn’t that simple. Yes, there are knowledge and practices that they could learn, but we are not on a completely different level from them. We are more similar than we would like to let on sometimes. I constantly find myself thinking that I would do exactly what these women are doing if I were in their situation. If I had 7 children I wouldn’t use all the fuel necessary to boil water for all of them. If I had to choose between buying food for my family and buying a latrine cover or soap, then I’m going to take the food. When the only water source I have access to is half a day’s walk from my house, washing my hands seems like a waste of water. Is each of the 10 members of my family really supposed to wash their hands every time they use the latrine? Practices like use of communal water for hand-washing make sense. There is limited water so why not use as little as possible for hand washing?

I’m also not convinced that hand washing itself is the answer. It doesn’t necessarily clean your hands completely of germs. Even if it did, the environment here isn’t going to let those hands stay germ free for long. In the US, people don’t interact with their environment very often. We have counters to set food on, stoves to cook on, bed frames to sleep on, and in house piped water to drink. In Kiwangwa, every one of these things is on the dirt floor. You can’t touch the pot without touching the dirt around it. You can’t get water that’s clean. Everything is dirty and hand washing isn’t going to fix that fact. These people in Kiwangwa don’t need someone coming in telling them they need to wash their hands; they need someone coming in to drill a bore well.