Cecila , Nyoli Ghana
Another Inspiration, another drop in our ocean of “Why”
I wish you were there with me every time I talk to a business employee and client of Water4 enterprises. I really do.. Cecila Maaleng smiled, cutting her eyes to the side as she spoke. In her 60’s, is the mother of 6, married to her husband Kwabeng for some 30 years now. Kwabeng is a farmer, now in his 60’s, who, by hand, cultivates 4 acres of maize and soybeans, with a short handled hoe, by himself. With a smile he let me know, behind his knock-off Ray Bans and traditional kufi hat, that in times past he managed 10 acres by hand. To support their family and help their children go through college, Cecilia started teaching herself skills to add to the family's income about ten years ago. That led to selling of small sun-dried fish in the market, then the preparation of a traditional food called “tizzet”, and finally the production of local soap.
Water is required to live, but lots of water is required to make bulk food and soap. On average, people in this area use around 5 gallons of water per person, per day–mostly limited by the weight and distance to carry that water. In contrast, Americans use an average of 82 gallons of water per day per person, that would mean 20 buckets and an average of 100 miles of walking per day for us if we tried to live like we do, in Africa.
Cecilia had been fetching water from a pond, where they also went for drinking water, walking close to a mile to get it. She was grateful she lived close, but its heavy and hard work. Making soap each week required ten trips to the dam, carrying 7 gallon basins that weigh 55lbs. In total, 5 miles of walking, 550lbs of carried water, 5 hours a week. Cecilia shared that as she increased in age, she really wondered how she would be able to keep that task up.
I looked at this sweet grandmother with awe imagining such herculean persistence and thought it a terrible irony that such dirty water was being used to make soap to clean oneself with..bathing again in disease ridden water with her soap.
After talking to Cecila, she invited me back the next day to see her making soap in the morning. Making soap involves boiling locally pressed palm oil over a wood fire in a giant outdoor cauldron until the red oil turns a shade of white. I watched as she carefully placed clear plastic bags over her hands and then covered them with long socks, tying them on with string. She was wearing long pants and thick socks on her sandal clad feet, to ensure the lye, a caustic substance, didn’t burn her skin during the process.
Now cooled, the oil is mixed with a solution of lye and water in a pot with a giant wooden spoon and becomes like a silly putty paste, which with her protected hands, she forms into balls that harden into soap as the chemical reaction between the mixed oil, water and lye takes place.
She sells the finished product in bulk to market resellers for $.25 per navel-orange sized soap ball. With soap alone she’s able to sell about $40 a week of soap, keeping $20 for the profit of her labor.
It takes three days of labor to make that soap, making the wages around $7 a day. She nodded to the NUMA water tap in her home and shared that now, with piped water, she can make 25% more soap in that time by not having to haul the water.
She spends $.50 for the NUMA water needed for those 3 days, saves hauling 550lbs of water, saves 5 hours or strenuous labor, and earns an additional $5 with the time saved. No sweat, no risk of injury, safe water, 10x return. You can imagine my smile.
That’s the power of a business based approach. With 50% of water projects failing at any one point in Africa, it is indeed insane to build more complex water systems and wells in the status quo manner of community management. Would you want your neighbors on the committee collecting cash and in charge of managing your water? Maybe put them in charge of the weekend barbecue, but not your water infrastructure.
By building professionalized water businesses that focus on revenue collection for sustainability, clients in rural homes now have access to piped water at their doorstep. It doesn’t work financially everywhere or for everyone yet, but we’re on a path to making that happen. And importantly, it happened for Cecilia this month and it’ll continue to compound each day of her life from this point forward as she continues to grow older with her husband Kwabeng.
As we were leaving a young woman in her 20’s came out of a room and walked awkwardly towards a bench where we’d been sitting. Cecilia said this was her daughter. I said “hello” and as she struggled to respond Cecilia told me that her daughter Anna, had been an excellent student, passed secondary school with the highest grades and went to University. As she excelled and progressed there, she had an unknown medical event, likely a stroke, that left her with very limited mobility and very limited speech. Cecilia, I learned, was also her caretaker. Majeed, the 4Ward Development water company employee and I stopped to breathe it in. In a community where 1 in 5 children likely died from waterborne illness, in the hot, rural, poverty context of Nyoli–Anna had risen ahead and did the almost impossible in academic excellence. I’m sure it was a sensation of liftoff and then tragedy. Suddenly the weight of that water had even greater significance. In a family that had experienced tragedy, a negative change, here was a sign of hope, or progress, of a future that perhaps would result in less suffering and a little prosperity.
I knelt beside Anna, asked if I could put my hand on her shoulder, and prayed with the utmost of my spirit. May God relieve her illness, may her body align with the alert and inspired mind I witnessed in her eyes, might she be healed to have her own family, her own future, the aspirations she and her family imagined. May her aging parents be strengthened as caretakers in an era where they begin to think about their need for such care on the horizon. Might we continue to provide access to life giving water, to a light of hope, and enact change that can allow these determined, entrepreneurial, and committed to rise.
It’s not just water, it’s not just material poverty, it’s the textured lives of determined people with their heads held high in the most difficult scenarios you can imagine—and we’re going to figure out how to end the crisis of water and failed water projects by listening to them, designing delivery of safe water in the way they want, responding to needs each day through the feedback of consumer purchases, and keeping it flowing forever because that’s what will be good for all involved..