Do you really need a Plasma TV to make you happy?

The most amazing stories of strength, courage and perseverance amongst the most challenging and difficult of circumstances in developing countries usually come from women. This story from ActionAid in Ethiopia really struck a chord with me so I thought I’d share it.

In the village of Nadugne Agam there was no water locally and the women had to carry it from the river, bent double, in back-breaking, 25-litre heavy-duty containers strapped to their shoulders.

It took almost an hour to walk there. Then they had to dig in the dry river bed until water seeped through the stones. That could take another hour. After that came the stagger back to their village, an agonising two hours, or more. For one woman, one day, this proved too much. When she reached her wattle-and-daub hut she lay down, exhausted. Her thirsty child was waiting. He asked for a drink. Get it yourself, she said, and fell asleep.  When she awoke she found that the child, as he tipped the container, had spilt the water. Enraged, she took a stick to teach him a lesson. She beat him so hard that he died. Tragically many children died this way but it wasn’t the only ill-consequence of Dalocha’s terrible water shortage. “At the river, we drank the same water as the animals drank and defecated by,” said Byaznlegn. “We got dysentery and diarrhoea; many children died. We spent so much time fetching water that we had little time for growing crops to feed our families. The children could not go to school because they had to help their mothers fetch water or stay at home to mind the house and the little ones.”

When one women suggested they should cap a spring which rose seven kilometers away, and pipe the water to all the local villages, the men smirked. “They said that women would never manage such a complex project,” Bichol said. “They said, ‘Let the women try and when they fail we’ll take over’.” But the women, with training from ActionAid, made a huge success of the enterprise. They added more boreholes, until there were eight across the area, each with its own pump and a generator. And they capped the spring, which produces 23 litres of water per second, and pumped it to the top of Gafat Hill into a 60,000-litre reservoir tank. From there it flows, gravity-fed, in four directions, through a 70-kilometre network of pipes.

With the water came much else. The women, who initially had been afraid even to come to village meetings – so low is the status of women in Ethiopian society – became emboldened by their success. They constituted the majority in the water project’s 178-member general assembly. All 16 members of the executive board are women. They demanded health services such as vaccination, and took over the fight against malaria, running a programme to spray the walls of local houses and distribute insecticide-charged bed-nets. They started a small savings scheme. They participated actively not just in community meetings but have become a force on the local and district councils.

Water has brought two social revolutions. “We send our children to school, that’s the big change,” said Bichol Tselela. In Dalocha school enrolment has risen from 15pc to 71 per cent, thanks to a combination of the children now having the time to go to school and the government’s abolition of school fees for those under 15, a move made possible by the freeing of cash after the scrapping of Third World debt by the G8 at Gleneagles and elsewhere. Two of the villagers have even sent children to university. The second major change is in the “women’s work” business of fetching water. “Now we have boys sharing the work equally with the girls,” said Bichol. “About 5 per cent of the men are doing it regularly, as a matter of routine. And in the dry season, many men will go when there is a long queue while the women prepare the food. It’s a very big change.”

“We have all started vegetable and fruit gardens which produce an income for us,” she said. I earn enough to buy oil, sugar, clothes and fertiliser.” When she could expand the garden around her house no more she built a new bigger mud-hut house on the other side of the village square. She and her husband Ibro constructed a storehouse for their produce. Then she built a house/shop in Dalocha town and rented it to a tradesman.

What had she done with her new money? “We bought a bed; before we slept on the floor,” Nuria told me. “And we bought separate utensils and plates for guests, some small tables and some ornaments. We are very happy now.”

It makes you wonder whether you really need that Plasma TV to make you happy doesn’t it!!