Working for water

JOZINI, South Africa (CNN) -- Josh Macabuag is in Jozini, South Africa, where he will be working with the charity Engineers Without Borders (EWB).

EWB is an international organization that is committed to engineering for international development. It takes on building projects across the world to benefit areas in need of structural rejuvenation or renovation.

Over the course of the next twelve months he will be helping to build a new sports and leisure facility for the local community. Follow his experiences over the coming year in his blogs and video diaries.

October 30, 2007
Let me explain why water is such a massive issue here.

Getting access to enough clean drinking water is a very serious problem for rural communities here, and probably the number one challenge for the local government. The problem can be broken down to finding a water source, making the water drinkable and getting it to the communities.

We're lucky here in Jozini since we sit next to a massive dam, so the source is obvious. There's also a treatment works here, meaning that there's enough clean water for the town itself (hence the pristine water running out of the taps in my chalet).

The problem is for the outlying areas. The current treatment works is too small to make enough clean water for people in the rural areas, and more pipelines are needed to get the water to where it's needed.

A new treatment works is being built, although it's very far behind schedule. Piping the water (out to the rural areas) is a big problem for two main reasons:

Firstly, Zulu people traditionally like to spread out. Families live on homesteads which would consist of a few huts, surrounded by land and then fenced off. That means that a community of several hundred households will be spread over a very wide area, probably with nothing even resembling a road anywhere to be seen.

So piping water to people's homes (even if there was enough water) isn't really an option. That means you need collection points where everyone can go get water. Even so, there's still a lot of piping needed.

Secondly, the actual digging of the trenches isn't straightforward when you don't have a big shiny mechanical digger handy. It's also actually law here that unskilled jobs must use local labor i.e. if local people can do the job then they have to be employed. The idea being community empowerment: getting people jobs rather than just giving everything to a few wealthy digging companies, or whatever. So the miles of pipe trenches have to be dug by hand.

One other point is that Jozini is one of five municipalities in the uMkhanyakude District and all water and sanitation issues are the responsibility of the district offices, not the local municipalities. So since we're officially working for Jozini, we shouldn't really be getting involved in any water issues, which is a bit of rubbish since whenever we ask people what they need the most they will almost always say "water".

I don't know what I can do, but I need to see if I can do something and since we still haven't managed to get an audience with the mayor, let alone getting her to formally introduce us to the district offices, we'll have to go and introduce ourselves. E-mail to a friend