WORLDVIEW

The Magazine of the National Peace Corps Association

Winter 2005, Vol. 18, No. 4

THE PUMP THAT FAILED

Returning to a village in Mali where water is always an issue

by Tappan Heher 

Water.  Ji, in Bambara.  Mali is a land-locked country through which the Niger River twists and turns on its course from the mountains of Guinea to the delta at Lagos.  But in Mali, you are never far from the rapidly-encroaching Sahara.  And ji is always an issue in this country.  

            This is the Sahel, once a land of forests and jungles and lions and elephants and three great African empires.   Timbuktu once had the water to support hundreds of thousands of students, professors, sages, merchants, salt and gold traders and farmers.  But much of that is gone now.  One herd of elephants survives, an elusive and extended family that keeps on the move, looking as always for water.

            Niono, my hometown, is the main market town in the Region of Niono, with a population of 20,000. It lies at the end of the paved road from Segou.  Beyond it, dirt roads and the desert routes to Mauritania and Timbuktu.  Niono's mud houses and the mosque-second only to Djenne's as the world largest mud structure-are a town built in the 1930's by the French when they tried to transform a million hectares of dry dusty land on the edge of the Sahara to rice cultivation.  They built a dam at Markala, 60 kilometers south of Niono, and established an intricate canal system to supply water for the region's new rice crops, millet and village gardens.  The canals also feed larger waterways; near Niono is the Fala, a virtual lake which is a winter home to countless migratory birds from Europe.  From the Fala, smaller waterways deliver water to villages about 30 kilometers north of Niono.  

            All this water makes life pleasant up in Niono.  For many years a large Dutch community≠they are quite good at maintaining canals, locks and dikes-assisted the Office du Niger, which controls the canals and the disbursement of water in the region.  On Sunday afternoons, I used to sail on Fala aboard The Flying Dutchman, a small craft a friend of mine, Hendrick, had brought from Holland.  Yup, we were tacking in the winds only 50 kilometers from the Sahara.  Below the Markala dam, and throughout the rest of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, all the way to Nigeria water was scarce.

            Fala and the French lake and canal system never supported more than 100,000 hectares of rice, so most of the water in Niono is unused and probably absorbed back into the atmosphere. The lake has in recent years made Niono home to the largest mosquito population in the country, and the subsequent malaria rates are also the highest.  

Five years ago, my Malian mother, Amou, lost a seven-year-old boy, Modibo. I remember him from when he was three and four, adorable, bright, funny, but with a hollow unearthly look in his eyes. When I returned last summer, Amou told me that one night when she went into his room, he was burning up with fever. She rushed him to the hospital, where he died the next day. I cannot imagine how many times that has happened to Niono families.

            I had returned to Mali to shoot a documentary, "Gone To Mali", a project I decide to do after I lost my American mother to uterine cancer.  She had been a reading teacher in the inner city in Trenton, New Jersey for 27 years and loved the fact that Iπd been a Peace Corps volunteer.  So with money inherited from her hard-earned savings, I went back 12 years after Peace Corps with two great old friends from my training group, Tricia Heinlen and Kim Wert.  It was incredible to be back in Mali and to see people who are among the kindest and most hospitable in my world.  

            The town, as I entered it, looked the same. The canals still water the huge palms and canopied trees that line the roads and provide shaded the long, hot and dusty road as we drove from Segou.  

            The trip was a great success for us all. But there were bittersweet moments.  The news about Modibo, for one.  I was able to help Amou and her family finish a new house they are building in a new village, N23, that is far from the canals.  Amou wanted to get away from the mosquitoes.  

            But Niono, too, was a shock to me.  The pristine paved road is now so badly torn up that cars and trucks have worn on a parallel dirt one that is much smoother.  While I hung out for a couple of days with Amou and her family, I heard their complaints about Niono. 

            In the rainy season, the Dutch used to pump excess water from the lake into a large gully that runs through the middle of the residential Niono for about half a kilometer.  The people call the gully, which runs about 30 meters deep, the collecteur des pluies.  The rain collector.  Every week or so when it filled with water, some algae, a bit of trash a dead goat and a chicken or two, the Dutch would pump it out and suck away the mosquitos.  Unfortunately, the Dutch left Niono about five years ago.  

The Office du Niger is responsible for maintenance of the collector, but has ignored that responsibility.  The pump,  which is marked "Made In Rotterdam", is broken.  The collecteur is a stew of thickly breeding mosquitoes, dead animals, feces, sewage, garbage, shards of glass, the ubiquitous plastic baggies and an assortment of anything that runs out of Malian concessions in heavy rainstorms and out into the gully at the end of the street.  I almost puked when I saw it.  

            The Nionois are up in arms.  The day we drove down to find the pump, a Malian man stopped our car.  He thought we were an NGO from Bamako coming to help.  He ran into his house and pulled about a hand-written placard that read, "Monsieur le President, aidez-nous! Nettoyez le collecteur de Niono!"  Mr. President, help us!  Clean the Niono collector!.  He asked us to film him. 

            We met Charlie and Janet Finesilver, volunteers about to close their Peace Corps service in the town.  They have worked hard to improve conditions in Niono.  They organized school kids to clean up garbage and raised money from their home in New Hampshire for gloves and wheelbarrows.  Janet works with kids and womenπs group on clean-up projects and on ways to avoid mosquitoes and malaria.  Charlie works with Alphalog, an NGO that builds sanitary latrines made of cement.  They monitor the pumps that provide clean water.  

            The water table in Niono is incredibly high: I could water my vegetable garden by dipping only a few feet down into my well.  But with women washing clothes in the canals, and everyone bathing and defecating, not to mention the collecteur and its runoff, Niono's water is unsafe to drink.  

            Saudi pumps dot the town, mercifully.  But there is a small fee for each bucket of the clean fresh ji.  And there is such a demand for it that the crowds often get feisty, so Alphalog pays older women and men to collect the coins and maintain peace.  We filmed two kind old ladies who sat proudly and happily under a hay and wood shade cover built next to a Saudi pump.  They only stopped chatting when they had to yell at kids fighting over their turn.

            We also drove to a small village, Niafassi-Bamana, where I had worked with two other Peace Corps volunteers, digging, planning and seeding a large vegetable garden for the village.  Annette Viola dug two wells.  Anne Nobis helped the villagers market the vegetables every week in Niono.  We encouraged them to plant eucalyptus and mango trees around it, and a live fence.  

            The village chief led me to the place where the garden had been 15 years ago.  The land is burned away.  Why?  The Office du Niger came out one day a couple years ago and told him the village was using too much water for the garden, the chief told me.  Theirs was one of the best of the region's gardens and they were forced to abandon it or lose the water rights for their rice fields.  

            As a result of my return to Niono, I have decided to create a fund called "Nettoyons Niono."  Let's Clean Up Niono.  I will use the footage I have shot there to raise money to repair the collector.  Ji, from which all life springs, is of the utmost importance.  And even in that rare town in Mali where ji is plentiful, it is still the difference between disease and health, life and death.