Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

We were having lunch in the offices of a project which has the commendable
aim of providing water and sanitation for rural communities in Ghana. The
conversation, naturally, centred on the business of water – and in particular
the problem of persuading people that the water from a borehole, although
it may taste different from the water they’re accustomed to, is healthier
than an all too easily contaminated open pond. While we talked, Harry –
a rotund and jolly Ghanaian on the administrative side of the operation
– was ladling chips on to his plate with a generous hand.

‘You ought to cut down on those,’ Joe – a doctor – told him. ‘Too much
fat in your diet’s bad for you.’

‘Ah!’ Harry replied cheerfully. ‘I’ve been eating like this all my life,
and it never did me any harm!’

‘That,’ said Joe, ‘is exactly what the villagers say about drinking
from their old ponds.’

It was one of those moments when you suddenly see something from a different
perspective.

The trouble is, when you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to drill a well,
put in a hand-pump and train local volunteers how to maintain it, frustration
can set in if you discover later that the villagers aren’t drinking the
water. I was part of a team evaluating the progress of the project, and
one of our findings was that in some of the villages they weren’t using
pump water for drinking because they didn’t like the taste.

Actually, they have good justification for their verdict on palatability.
Some of the ground water has quite a high iron content. Leave it to stand
a while and it forms a reddish scum; it’s unpleasant to drink, and stains
utensils. The problem was duly noted some time ago, and the introduction
of low-technology iron extraction units was planned, but it’s not that easy.

Some units have been successfully used in Asia, but there’s no automatic
guarantee the same design will be suitable for rural Ghana, particularly
if you want to use locally available materials to make it. A proper study
needs to be done before leaping in with a programme of installing equipment,
and that costs extra money. Since the extraction of money from donors is
rather more tricky than the extraction of iron from water, for the time
being the water still tastes of rusty nails, and getting people to use it
still relies on plain persuasion.

But then, who are we to feel superior about it? We in Britain have had
the message drummed into us for enough years now that we ought to eat less
fat and more fresh fruit-and-veg – but how much notice do we take? Every
time someone does a survey of eating habits, the improvement seems minimal
– more wholemeal bread and low-fat spreads, perhaps, but more fried chicken
takeaways by way of compensation. We feel a little more guilty about our
junk-food diet, but nationwide there hasn’t been much more than a token
movement towards healthier eating.

The trouble in both cases is that the link between cause and effect
is neither simple nor obvious. Not everyone who eats meat three times a
day and chips with everything dies from heart failure; not everyone who
drinks from a contaminated river gets diarrhoea. Problems caused by bad
eating habits can take years to show up; equally, you may not know you’ve
picked up guinea worm until months after drinking larvae-infested water.
Even when you know the connection, logical reasoning somehow doesn’t seem
so compelling when you are actually confronted with the choice between a
chocolate bar and a carrot-or between good-tasting and bad-tasting water.

Changing habits as fundamental as eating and drinking is difficult for
all of us. I suggest that the next time any development worker or health
educator feels inclined to be impatient or patronising towards an apparently
stubborn or stupid client, they should take a critical look at the contents
of his or her own lunch box.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the aid charity World Vision.