The trucks rolled into Chilonga with men, equipment and a sense of occasion: the government was bringing water to the people.
It had been quite a wait, decades or centuries, depending on whether you counted from pre-colonial times, but at least the job was to be done properly.
Shovels and pipes spilt from the trucks and workers cracked open the red earth. The village of Chilonga lies nearly 20km from the source of water in the mountains, but work was completed within two months, thanks to villagers who were trained and mobilised to help.
Steel taps gleamed in the sun and produced clean water at the slightest twist.
Malawi’s rural water projects were an example for Africa. It was hailed as a leap into a new era. The year was 1984.
On a hot afternoon 18 years later Saizan Kwanda, one of the villagers who helped the engineers in 1984, rested a foot on a metal pipe jutting from his maize field. It was about 20cm long, rusty, warped, and all that was left of Chilonga’s new era.
”The grandchildren don’t believe us when we say we had water brought to us from under the ground,” said Kwanda (85).
The villagers are back with their ancestors: down by the Shire river, scooping contaminated water into buckets and using it to drink, cook and bathe.
But now new trucks are bringing a new strategy and the promise of clean water that will not stop flowing.
From the mid-1970s gravity-fed water systems began to be built as part of a race for development in Malawi. Mountain water collected in weirs was filtered, tanked and piped to the taps. Diseases such as cholera claimed fewer victims and women were spared daily trudges to crocodile-infested rivers.
Under the 30-years of autocratic rule by president Hastings Banda, officials and communities were ordered to keep the system running — and they usually managed to obey. But when Banda fell in 1994 his democratically elected successors gave communities the responsibility to manage their own supplies.
With no dictator to compel volunteers and no cash to pay professionals, villages such as Chilonga watched helplessly as one tap after another dried up. Screws loosened, washers eroded and tanks blocked. By 2000 about 40% of the taps in the area were dry and the system was close to collapse.
”What could we do?” asked Saizan Kwanda.
Quite a lot, as the past year has shown.
The people of the surrounding Machinga district have learnt to organise, raise money and solve problems so well that now 90% of the taps are working and the rest are expected to be rehabilitated soon.
It took a charity, WaterAid, to prod the communities towards empowering themselves. In partnership with a private Malawi contractor, it recommended that each tap have its own committee, typically of three people, to collect pennies from each household to fund repairs. A main committee handles the bigger tasks.
Transactions are recorded in notebooks and receipts are available for scrutiny to build trust and transparency — scarce resources in a country shunned by some aid agencies because of corruption.
These seemingly small steps are a dramatic departure for drought-stricken farmers alien to such activism and not all are convinced: the rusty pipe in Chilonga showed it was one of the villages that had not yet organised itself.
Community leaders like Royce Kan-yumwa, flown to Ethiopia by WaterAid to witness similar schemes, have returned with evangelical fervour.
”We learnt we can stand on our own feet. We can run things on our own. It’s a matter of time,” he said. — Â