Clean water leads to life

Kamila, a 46-year-old mother of seven has been serving as a community health worker for more than eight years. Although she knew what to do when people were affected by dirty water, she didn’t know what she could do to prevent its effects on her children and the community. 

“We used the same water that cows and sheep used,” she recalls. “We were in one side of gully (an open area where water collected), filling out our buckets for drinking and cooking and cows and sheep were in other side of gully and used the same water.”

 
Her daughter, Fatima, 13, also remembers the wretched water. “Sometimes water had bad smell and its color was yellow but students had to drink it, they didn’t have any [other] way,” she says. “Most of the time, my classmates were sick and absent in class or when they were in school they found headache or vomiting and diarrhea,” she says, remembering how many of her fellow classmates would go home early. 

Dealing with the dirty water and its effects took its toll on Kamila and the community. “Every day neighbours and others came to my home and asked me to give them Oral Rehydration Solution, especially children suffering from diarrhea,” remembers Kamila, who distributed all of the pre-made packets she had and also taught community members how to make their own solutions out of sugar and salt.

 
Kamila knew how to treat the effects of dirty water but was unaware of how people could be protected from dirty water if this common well was the only source of water for humans and animals. 

“We didn’t have any information about refining and boiling the water,” she remembers. Then, “one day a team from World Vision and the Ministry of Public Health came to our village and spoke with Arbab (an elder of the village). They visited the gully, [and] Arbab explained [the community’s problems to them] them regarding water.”

A month later, Kamila and other community health workers were invited to participate in water, sanitation and hygiene training, provided by World Vision. “[During] that training we learnt how to make water safe,” she remembers. World Vision teams then returned again, providing each family with water purification packets (PUR) and buckets where the clean water could be prepared. 

At first, some families were skeptical. “Some people didn’t accept to use PUR,” she remembers. “They thought it was the killer but when Arbab and the governor drank two glasses of refined water, those people accepted.” 

“We were really mused when we saw a lot of small sand and worms collected on the clothes,” she says, remembering what they saw when the public health officer screened the water. “We got surprised how we remained a live up to now.”
“We celebrated that day and all [the] people were happy about this event,” she remembers. 
“Now I and my classmate use the water, which is refined by teachers at school, or sometimes my mother give me a bottle of refined water to use in school,” says Fatima with a smile.

The effects are easy to see. “Diarrhea became less in our village,” says Kamila. “The number of families who requested Oral Rehydration Solution became less.” Today, instead of running out of the solution, even the pre-mixed packets even go unused.