I met Nolindile a year ago walking with several other women to fetch water from a muddy stream. I was in their village, not far from Port St John’s in the Transkei, researching a documentary that I was to spend the next 10 months filming.
I wanted to show what it’s like to live without taps or a supply of clean water, and the transformation that touches every aspect of life when it arrives. I wanted the people to tell the story for me. Nolindile became my central character and my friend.
When they had filled their containers Nolindile looked me in the eye and said to the interpreter, “tell her she must carry a bucket”.
The full bucket weighed twelve and a half litres. I could barely lift it off the ground, let alone balance it on my head while walking up a steep and muddy slope. “You told us you were a wife,” she said, and looking me up and down, “you have the right build for it — so tell me how many cows were paid for you?”
Nolindile’s day begins before dawn when she makes the first of several long walks for water. There are walks for wood as well, a cooking fire to be built, fields to hoe, huts to dung and thatch. And then there is the bread. Someone donates flour and yeast and Nolindile, with two other women, bakes bread in a clay oven at the side of the road. At midday they carry it over to the school and distribute chunks of bread and jam with a protein drink to the children.
The fetching and carrying of water is one of the hardest and most time consuming tasks. Girls learn to help their mothers almost as soon as they can walk. Starting with small containers and graduating over the years to larger and larger ones, until they can lift and carry the heavy buckets on their heads.
The idea for this film had been with me for a very long time. Years of filming in war zones had familiarised me with every aspect of the depressing daily struggle for enough water to drink, cook with and wash in. Each time I was faced with a few days or weeks without clean water I would think it wouldn’t matter too much, but within hours it became the driving force of each day. During a drought in Mozambique, I had seen people close to death through lack of water, even when there was food available.
Water sources are non-renewable and are dwindling, or becoming contaminated. Wars have been fought about access to water through the centuries and it has been predicted that the worst wars of this century are likely to about water.
The Transkei is not a war zone, but an area of abundant rainfall with large rivers flowing to the sea. The people here have never had access to basic services. Like much of the rural, developing world most of the women have to walk a long way several times a day, every day to get water. Now things are beginning to change, and in the last eight years over seven million rural people now have clean water.
Over the months two parallel stories emerged. The day-to-day life of Nolindile and the village, and the water project. The film does not try to raise or answer all the complex issues that attend upon the coming of water. It allows the stories to unfold slowly, through the thoughts and lives of the characters, without hearing from ‘experts’ or the use of narration.
On our first shoot it rained ceaselessly. Rivers were in flood, the roads became impassable and we slipped and slithered along muddy paths carrying our equipment. Men and women were digging in trenches filled with water. Heaps of blue plastic pipes lay alongside endless trenches that stretched up and down the hills.
Some of the villagers expressed doubt about the project ever completing, saying that they had seen many schemes that started but had come to nothing. They would be pleased only when they saw water coming out of the taps.
The relationships between the contractors, and the men and women from the community who were doing most of the work were frequently fraught with misunderstanding.
We sat in on meetings, where issues about free basic water, maintenance, community involvement and what kind of taps to use, were discussed. We filmed tap stands being built and were there when the taps were switched on for the first time. But mainly we filmed Nolindile and her family.
Children in these communities suffer from all sorts of water borne and hygiene related diseases. Too often mothers find that getting enough firewood and boiling water is just one chore too many.
We saw the worst results of this on our return in March when there was an outbreak of cholera in the area and an emergency rehydration centre had been set up in a tent.
The switching on of the taps at the end of June turned out to be a very low-key event. The mayor arrived and everyone drank a glass of water, commenting on the taste. Nolindile was outspoken as ever, saying that she was pleased to have clean water but had hoped that the tap stand would be nearer to her house. Now she would like to have electricity.
The story reflects a year of change and drama in the village and in the lives of the main characters.
Fourteen African countries are already faced with water scarcity and at least five more, including South Africa, will face the same problem within next 10 years. Yet most Africans in rural areas use only 30 to 40 litres a day — compared to 700 litres in United States.
Our final visit was a month after the taps went on. There was a noticeable change in the village. With less distance to carry water fetching it had become manageable for younger children, boys and girls seemed to enjoy the chore and squabbled over who pressed down the tap. School children stop at the taps on the way home and drink with pleasure. We even saw men filling containers and carrying them home. Sadly the
Nolindile uses more water now, she does not have to get up so early or walk so far, what she longs for now is electricity, ‘Because we see other villages that have it — like the one across the river. It’s got lights.’
Bread and Water will be shown on Monday September 2 at 10 pm on SABC1 and DSTV Channel 46