Nor any drop to drink

Water is essential to life on this planet. The human body can survive a mere three days without water. Besides needing water to stay alive, human societies need water for many activities, from simple household uses for cooking or washing to growing food to complex industrial processes for manufacturing everything from foodstuffs to the electricity that powers the computer this article is being written on.

Despite the huge volumes of water in the world’s oceans, there is a finite amount of fresh water on our planet, which circulates through a complex web of interconnecting systems which, when left to themselves, operate with great efficiency, providing terrestial life with pure, potable water.

But we humans have not left these systems alone. We dam and divert rivers and drain wetlands, we choke them with garbage, pump sewage and toxic chemicals into them. We even pollute the very air through which rain must pass.

Water can carry many life-threatening diseases: cholera, dysentery, gastro-enteritis. Unclean water remains the biggest killer of infants in under-developed regions of the world, adding to the misery of poverty.

Most of us, especially in urban areas, give no thought, whenever we open a tap to fill a glass or take a shower, to where the water comes from — we simply take it for granted that it is safe to drink or bathe in, and that it will always be there. Yet, millions of South Africans still do not have access to safe drinking water.

South Africa is a water-stressed country. Two-thirds of the country gets less than 500mm average annual rainfall. The region is also subject to periodic droughts. At the moment, most of us probably believe we have enough water for all our needs. But our population keeps on growing, and our need to expand our economy will lead to ever greater demand for this finite resource. Experts are predicting that, within the next 20 years (perhaps sooner), our demand for water will overtake our supply.

Rivers and wetlands form an intrinsic part of our water systems. By slowing water flow, wetlands help store water and prevent erosion. Their attendant plant life helps to filter out solids and purify water by absorbing many toxic substances. This vegetation also provides a habitat for insects, frogs, birds and animals, making them havens of biodiversity.

Yet, South Africa has already lost about half of its wetlands. Can we afford to lose any more?

Dancing gumboots and dead chickens

‘Wear comfortable shoes,” the invitation suggests. We’re going to visit the Mayibuye Klip River Wetlands programme in one of the oldest parts of Soweto — Orlando East, close to historic Kliptown.

We congregate at the Southgate shopping centre, where we board a luxury bus. Along the way, executive director of Mayibuye, Patrick Kwelepeta, points out a few landmarks: Vista University campus, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, Winnie Mandela’s house. For many on the bus, this is their first trip into Soweto, even though they’ve lived in Johannesburg for most of their lives.

Mid-winter is not the best time of year to be visiting Soweto. Burnt stretches of veld are littered with broken bottles, rusty cans. The small, utilitarian houses look even dingier than usual under the hazy winter sky. Scraggly donkeys, goats, pigs and chickens scrounge about in the dead grass and weeds.

The bus heads for Orlando Stadium, home of famous local football team, Orlando Pirates — the Buccaneers or Bucs, as they are affectionately known. Right alongside the stadium is our destination: Selelekela High School.

We mill about in the dusty dirt road outside the school’s gates. A group of learners, wearing dark-green T-shirts over their school uniforms, emerge to join us. They are all members of the school’s Ecoclub, started just six months ago. Membership is voluntary but limited to 30 learners. They are all in either grade nine or ten, one learner tells me.

The Mayibuye wetlands project received funding in late 2003 which has enabled them to involve seven schools — two high and five primary — along the course of the Klip River through Soweto, from Orlando East all the way to Lenasia, Kwelepeta explains. He and his colleagues visit each school once a month to conduct environmental education in practical ways.

The purpose of today’s visit is for the members of the Ecoclub to take water samples from the river, which they will later analyse in biology classes.

Our group traipses off round the far end of the stadium, where we gingerly sidestep a marshy area surrounding a leaking sewer cover. Several pigs leap up from their wallow and scarper down the slope ahead of us.

The road leads below the railway overpass. We scramble down the banks to a bend in the Klip River. To one side, the railway embankment looms over us, and the regular rumble of Metro trains almost drowns out the low murmer of water over rocks.

I realise that two concrete culverts emerging from the high railway embankment must be connected to the leaking sewer we passed further up. A slimy trickle of water drips into the first pool, which is almost invisible under a blanket of plastic bottles and bags. The carcasses of several dead chickens add a macabre touch. ‘They’ve been sacrificed to the ancestors,” Kwelepeta tells us. ‘People also slaughter goats along the river, even cows.”

The Ecoclub did a big clean-up along this stretch of river in March, but part of the problem, Kwelepeta says, is the need to involve the entire community in keeping the river clean. But illegal dumping of garbage has dwindled considerably over the past five years, he adds. People are beginning to see the riverine environment as a resource, and also to understand how it links to health issues, he says.

‘We’re planning a walking trail along the entire course of the Klip River,” he tells us. ‘BirdLife SA has also started the first bird club in the townships. We want to train residents in aspects of ecotourism. Mayibuye is not so much about the environment but about social development. We’re also working on greening the schools. This is a slow process but we’ve been encouraged by our progress so far.’

The team leader today is Martin Ramothibe, who quizzes the learners about what they’ve learned in class about catchment history. Then he hands over a bottle of clean tap water and asks the kids to examine it: with their eyes, noses and tastebuds. He wants them to do the same with the samples of river water they are to collect — except taste it, of course!

Then several learners don gumboots and clamber down into the riverbed. The river curves around a stretch of unburnt veld, where a herd of goats browses, half-hidden in the tall, winter-blonde grass. A young herder lounges against a rock in the middle distance. If one ignores the sprawl of houses in the distance and the rumbling of trains above us, the scene evokes a peaceful, bucolic past.

Ramothibe says he is into his third year with Mayibuye. He first heard about the need to clean up the township environment some years ago at a community workshop held by the South African Reparation Movement, so he started volunteering to work on projects. Incredibly, he only receives a small gratuity for the work he does with Mayibuye.

I ask him what the response has been to the creation of the Ecoclub at Selelekela. ‘At first, the teachers and learners were a bit reluctant,” he replies, ‘because they thought it would mean a lot of extra work, but since we’ve taken them on outings — to Delta Environmental Centre, the Melville Koppies and a park in the Magaliesberg — they have begun to be enthusiastic. We are teaching them about the concept of wetlands, so they will understand why it [the Klip River] must be cleaned up.”

Back at the school, we gather in a classroom for speeches from teachers and learners. Members of the Ecoclub perform a brief play about the hazards of polluting, then use the gumboots so recently submersed in the river to stomp and clap out lively rhythms.

These bright young people are custodians of the future. But, I wonder, as I remember those dead chickens, do they really grasp the enormity of the task ahead of them?

Gauteng Schools Water Project

Mayibuye Klip River Wetlands Project in Soweto is one of many youth-centered projects to clean up rivers in the province, which are potentially serious health hazards to many residents.

It forms part of a provincial schools initiative which includes a river-quality monitoring programme, using low-cost scientific procedures that use a local river as a springboard for environmental, social and scientific studies in the classroom. Kits to enable pupils to perform a number of tests to determine the quality of local water sources are available to schools and ecoclubs at low cost. The project incorporates teacher capacity building.

For more information, contact Di Beeton at the Delta Environmental Education Centre by phone on 011 888 4831 or < a class='standardtext' href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected].

Signposts

Several organisations offer educational materials (posters, brochures), tours of their facilities, and seek to work actively with schools on environmental projects to protect our precious water resources.