Sophie Salffner has spent six months in Nigeria doing linguistic fieldwork. She never lived a day without water, but learnt how to manage it in a different way. In this short article, Sophie describes her experience in the world of water scarcity, far away from home and far away from the luxurious daily showers and running tap water of her home country Germany

Salffner, Sophie

English

SOAS Research Online

Sophie Salffner has spent six months in Nigeria doing linguisticfieldwork. She never lived a day without water, but learnt howto manage it in a different way. In this short article, Sophiedescribes her experience in the world of water scarcity, far awayfrom home and far away from the luxurious daily showers andrunning tap water of her home country Germany.I w i l l S T A R T B Y E X P L A I N I N G A L I T T L Eabout the village I was in. It is calledIkakumo, and it is situated in SouthwestNigeria, in the Northeastern corner ofOndo State. In terms of infrastructure,there is electricity but like everywhere elsein Nigeria this resource is never stable andthere are power cuts every day. There isalso an asphalt road leading to the village,although this road ends shortly after onepasses the village. Yet mini cabs come tothe village a few times every day, allowingthe inhabitants a means of transportationwhenever they need it. Open drainage for waste and rainwatercan be found on both sides of the road,though the village lacks an elaboratedcanalisation system. It has a market, two primary schools, a sec-ondary school, a number of churches, twomosques, and a very basic health centreand dispensary (like a little chemist) butthey do not have trained medical staff. Iwould guess that there are around 1,000 to1,500 people living in the village, with morepeople living in settlements in the bush.There are a number of water sources. Thefarthest is the Osse River, which you will probably find on anaverage sized Nigerian map. It is about six kilometres down theroad and that is where people go, for example, to wash andclean the melon seeds from their farms. Then there are variouslittle streams and ponds where people fetch water for drinking.These are between one and three kilometres away from the vil-lage. Fetching water is a job for the women and girls, but ifthere are not enough girls in the house the boys also have tocome along. They go with bowls, buckets and jerry cans. Thesize of these depends on the person carrying them. Usually itvaries between half-filled five-litre buckets for the smallest five-year old to big thirty-litre bowls for the women. When theyreach the pond, everyone takes off their shoes as a matter ofhygiene. The water is scooped out with little plastic bowls(metal is not allowed) and poured into the cans and buckets. During the rainy season there is enough water to go aroundfor everyone, but at the height of the dry season, which isaround February and March, you might see queues of peoplewaiting for the pond to refill. The water itself is slightly green-ish brown, and people put something theycall alaun in it, so that the particles settle.The water becomes clear then, but theremay still be bacteria in it.The Fulani, a nomadic people who keepcattle, also use the streams and the rivers toprovide water for their cows. The animalsare not allowed to use the drinking waterponds, and some local villagers do not evenlike it when they use the smaller streams.This is therefore a point of conflict betweenthe nomadic Fulani and the settled villagers.In Ikakumo villagers have various wells forfetching washing and cooking water, andthere are around five functioning UNDPsponsored boreholes too. The wells arebetween five to seven metres deep, andeverybody draws water from them with lit-tle five-litre buckets held on ropes, whichare then emptied into bigger buckets andbowls and taken into the house. The bore-holes are about thirty-five metres deep andhave pumps. It is the children’s job to standthere, pump away and fill all the buckets,and from what I could see they have a lot offun doing that. The wells and boreholes arecovered and locked. There are usually oneor two respectable families in the neigh-bourhood who are the guardians of the key. The boreholes, forexample, are usually opened in the morning and then againbetween three and seven in the afternoon. People actually queueup around that time, and if you drive through some of the vil-lages you will see a long and very straight line of buckets in frontof the borehole, up to thirty metres long. That image was alwaysfunny to see! The borehole water is of drinkable quality and itdoes not need to be treated before use.Regarding toilets, some people urinate wherever they are in thevillage, especially the children and the men, but also some ofthe women. For faeces people will either use the bushes by theside of the road or use the latrines at the back of some houses.W AT E RW I S E • S P A N D A N E W S • 1 32/2007fEATURE-STORIESSPANDANEWSL I V I N G W I T H WAT E R S C A RC I T YA T A L E F R O M A F R I C AS O P H I E S A L F F N E RWA T E R P R O V E R B S} Dirty watercannot be washed(Togo).~} Only a fool teststhe depth of the waterwith both feet(Mali).~} Every course ofwater has its source(Zulu).~ª | FEATURE-STORIESThese are basically pits with a hole where people can squat anddo their business. The latrines do not use water for flushing,which is an advantage.To take showers, people grab a fifteen-litre bucket with waterand a small bowl that they use to pour the water over them-selves. Then they simply scrub themselves with soap andsponges and use the rest of the water to rinse it off.I myself would get a five-litre pot of drinking water every dayor every other day to use for drinking, brushing my teeth,washing some fruit and sometimes also for cooking.I lived in a house with a proper toilet, but since there is no run-ning water in the pipes, it needed to be flushed with a bucket.For that I would try touse the water that was leftafter washing my clothesso that I could save somewater. However, I flushedthe toilet more often thanI washed my clothes, sosometimes I needed touse well water to flush it.I also used between oneand one and a half buck-ets of water every day formy showers (usually twoa day, one in the morn-ing and one at night).I needed up to three buck-ets of water every weekfor washing my clothes,and I got by with aboutfive litres a day or evenless than that for wash-ing dishes.In my house I had threebuckets: one of ten litres,one of eighteen litres, andanother of twenty-fivelitres. When I was on myown in the house I could manage with this quantity for abouttwo days, but when my host father was there we obviouslyneeded more.When it came to fetching water and re-filling my buckets Ialways wanted to do that myself. Partly because I wanted theexercise, but also because I didn’t want to play the princess,and because I wanted to live my life there the way the peoplein the village lived it. However, most of the time that was notpossible. Yoruba culture requires that a guest is well cared forand that children or anybody younger than oneself will helpadults or anybody senior to them. Since I was obviously olderthan the children and also a guest, the children would literallyfight over who could get my water or go to the borehole tofetch my drinking water. That took getting used to, but Iwould have insulted them if I had insisted on doing it myself.In the last months there was some construction work going on.A company drilled a one hundred metre deep borehole to sup-ply water to the village. Then they mounted big water tanks ona stand over the borehole and were to install a solar panel topower the pump that would bring up the water into the tanksfrom where it would go through pipes throughout the village.People could then draw it from taps rather than manually. Thework had started well before I came to the village, the pipesand taps were done while I was there, and then the projectcame to a sudden standstill. By the time I left the village theproject had not been finished, there still was no solar panelin sight and it was not clear what had happened. What hap-pened to the money for the solar panel was particularlyunclear. As far as I know there were no explanations from thegovernment institutions who were responsible for the pro-ject. I expect to see what has happened when I return therein September. Neighbouring villages have solar poweredpumps though and they work fine.A few weeks before I leftNigeria I received anemail from a friend whohad also been doing field-work in the country andwas about to go home toEngland. He finished offhis email commentingthat after having been inthe field for six monthshe was now looking for-ward to a cup of realcoffee, a cold beer and ahot shower. Did I agree?Most definitely when itcames to the coffee. Idrank coffee in Nigeria,but I never managed toget a decent cup ofespresso. Regarding thebeer I had to say thatNigeria has quite a fewnice beers that I can reallyrecommend. But aboutthe hot shower? Well,having been brought upin Germany I never real-ly minded the lukewarm temperatures of the water in Nigeria.But it sure is a treat not to have to pour the water over myself,but to just stand under my shower with the water raining downon me. And it sure doesn’t hurt to be able to just open the tapfor my water either...                                                                  ©The picture above was taken near Ikakumo, Ondo State, Nigeria, at theend of January 2007. It shows one of the language consultants (Matthis,the man wearing green and yellow trousers and shirt) with students oflinguistics from the University of Ibadan, who came for a short field tripto my village. After their work the language consultants took them for awalk around the village and the farms, where they collected more vocab-ulary on names of plants, crops and farming equipment. We ended up bythe water pond that I mentioned in the story and you can see a little boyfetching water and all the university students standing around the pondlooking at what is going on. Since most of them are city kids, theirclothes (as you can see) and their life style is very different from that ofthe village. In fact, to many of them fetching water from the pond is justas alien to them as it is to me!W AT E RW I S E • S P A N D A N E W S • 1 4Photo by Sophie Salffner.

Living with water scarcity. A tale from Africa

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