The difference WaterAid makes

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Today we set off to Bhadrak where we will stop for the night. We spend the day in a village where WaterAid has intervened, and now all 82 households have toilets and clean water. As we arrive the crowds chant "Well Come Well Come!" and we are all handed flowers and coconuts with straws. Welcoming speeches are made.
The contrast to yesterday is vast. This village has been declared 'Open Defecation Free' and since then no-one has got ill from diarrhoea. The difference in wealth can be measured by the reduction in medical fees and lost labour from sickness. The clothes here are brighter, the children have hair-cuts, wear sandals and go to school. Christina, Robert and I are introduced to a lady called Jemamani Sahoo, aged 63, who is very proud to show us her latrine. We then accompany her to the new handpump where she collects water in a round pot with a lid to keep it clean. Before WaterAid helped, Jemamani had to defecate in the open, where she could be seen by men, and in fear of snakes. She collected her drinking water from an open well.
After that we are shown a Participatory Rural Appraisal, or mapping exercise, that would have been undertaken in the early stages of this project. Everyone in the village joins in to draw a map on the ground by making lines in the dirt, sprinkled with coloured powders, which shows the position of all the houses, latrines, water points and other features. This is very important so that communities take ownership of their own development before any work commences.
Later on we gather round a makeshift stage where a cultural show is put on for us, including a very moving play, which despite being performed in untranslated Oriya (the local language) we can easily understand. It shows young boys pretending to defecate by the water, where people wash and drink from. One mother is left mourning the loss of her child from diarrhoea, whilst another boy is left desparately ill.

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Comments

[angela]

Amazing!
Hey, Sounds like you are having a fantastic trip - good luck with your last week in India. Perhaps we can catch up at the end of March? (Am back in the UK on work for 2 weeks!!!) Angela x