Saturday, December 31, 2011

Visiting the village

While the whole family was together for Christmas, we all went out to the village to visit my host family. Elias & Maia loved being outside and seeing all the animals.



Khala (Aunty) had made three different varieties of the the pitha sweets that are special winter treats. Made from milk, date sugar, coconut, and rice flour, they were a hit -- and not just with the kids.

Thanks to Hanna for the pictures -- I think the first 2 are hers.

map

The relief work described below was in the Dumuria and Dakhin Bedkashi areas shown -- right on the edge of the Sundarbon forest (dark green)

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Water after the cyclone

[Note: this was eventually put up on the MCC News site. Because it took a while to go up, I put it up here in the mean time. It is a report on a recent trip to survey MCC-funded cyclone relief work.]

Shahanara beams as she works the pump lifting water from the village pond into their new sand filter. She is one of seven women who are in charge of maintaining the filter, and her sense of pride and ownership is obvious. But mostly she is happy to have clean drinking water within a hundred yards of her house. Before the filter was put in last June, all the women of Pathorkhali village had to walk several miles and pay for pump water, or make do with murky pond water.


Water before and after the filter.

Pathorkhali village is in the center of the area worst ravaged by hurricane Aila in 2009. In the coastal belt of Bengal, it is not just the wild sea and storms that remind villagers of their vulnerability to nature: tigers often cross over from the Sunderban mangrove forest to carry off livestock -- or people. A young man of Pathorkhali was recently mauled by a tiger, and early they found remains of a child in the mangroves. The village is built along the embankment that protect them and the surrounding farmland from the tidal flows. On the edge of the village, a hundred yards of the embankment, torn out during the hurricane, is still missing. After almost two years of remaining open to the daily tides, the embankment was finally patched further back from the river earlier this year.

The broken section of embankment, and Sunderbon jungle beyond

Dead trees stand as testimony to the damage wreaked by two years of saline water inundation. Over much of the region, only date palm trees were able to survive the standing salt water. Rain water is only slowly washing salt from the fields, and much of the region is still barren earth at a time when it should be laden with ripening rice.

In search of water to drink

As the people of Pathorkhali and surrounding villages struggle to get back on their feet after Aila, drinking water continues to be a big burden. Especially for the women who sometimes spend half their day collecting it. In a country blessed with abundant water, this is an place where finding suitable drinking water is particularly difficult.

In most of the area, attempts at well drilling either stall at rocky layers, or else fail to bring up sweet water. Beside the pond in Pathorkhali is the rusting stump of a well that was sunk to 800 feet, then abandoned when it only brought up salty water. And the ponds that had been the traditional sources of drinking water were filled with salt by Aila's tidal surge.

Abandoned wells are a common sight in Koira

The pond that supplies Shahanara's filter has been a source of cooking and drinking water for three generations. The grandfather of the local patron landowner dug the pond as a gift for the community. When MCC's local partner Uttaran surveyed the area, this pond was a natural choice because of the community ownership, naturally low salt content, and lack of other drinking water options.

The pond sand filter is a simple system: a hand pump lifts water from the pond to let it slowly filter down through layers of sand and aggregate. This filtration, along with natural biological activity, renders the water clean and safe for drinking. The only maintenance needed is periodic rinsing of the filter bed, which is the responsibility of Shahanara's committee. But installation was not just a matter of building the filter -- most of the work was on the pond: emptying it of salt water and excavating it to build up the banks above flood level.

A pond sand filter with the inlet pipe visible in the background

Ongoing needs

Pathorkhali's pond filter now attracts women from all around, serving about 400 families by Shahanara's estimate. Rashida Begum is one of those who comes from furtherest away. She walks an hour from her village, trying to keep up with the needs of her extended family of 12. "We use six or seven kulshis a day, so getting water can take most of the morning," she says as she sits resting beside the well. "Sometimes my grandchildren come to help me. But when they are in school, I come alone."

Rasida leaves the well with her kulshi full

Rashida tells me of a pond in her village that also has sweet water, asking if they could not also get a filter there. I'm here just to see the MCC-funded filters. But the staff from our local partner, Uttaran, assure Rashida that they will remember her request and see what can be done. Uttaran is well aware of the continued need for drinking water in this area -- especially water sources that are designed with future flooding in mind.

Flooding is likely to happen with increasing frequency in this area. A rising sea level is a culprit in the long term, but more immediately -- and ironically -- new flood embankments are to blame, due to the changing siltation patterns they cause. But compared to the struggle with flooding, the drinking water problem is a relatively easy problem to solve.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

No trainer wheels!

My many-talented nephew now can ride on 2 wheels, at just 4 1/2 years old. Yesterday he also learned how to start all by himself. Learning to stop is hopefully next...