How Scottish Water projects are saving lives in Malawi
SCOTTISH Water’s Andrew Walker visited Malawi to see how funds raised by workers in Scotland are helping change lives overseas. Here, he tells what he saw.
IN the cold grey light of a 5am dawn, the women pull their colourful chitenge sarongs tight to help ward off the day’s early chill.
Charcoal burns in a small pit on the floor, a small degree of further comfort.
With daybreak, it is apparent that comfort is not something found easily here at Chikweo health facility.
The shelter I am sitting in provides only basic protection against the elements – the night was stormy, rainfall dampening the dust, but morning promises another baking hot day in Malawi.
The woman I am talking quietly with is called Khisse. She’s here at Chikweo with her pregnant niece. Expectant mothers must come to such facilities around a month before their due dates to get medical care to help cut Malawi’s maternal and neonatal mortality rate.
A family member accompanies them – Khisse in this case. She is her niece’s guardian.
It will be her niece’s third child. All three will have been born here, as she was. She knows all too well the circumstances in which she’s about to deliver life into the world.
Across the red dust yard is the small two-bed maternity room where her baby will be born. Water here doesn’t flow from a tap.
There is no running water at this facility. It’s kept in buckets lying on the floor, drawn early every morning from a village borehole, a ten-minute walk away, by the guardians.
There is only one toilet – a cramped pit latrine on the other side of the yard. It’s here new mums are taken to wash after giving birth. The latrine is next to the guardian’s shelter, which is adjacent to the facility’s medical waste incinerator and placenta pit.
There are days, Khisse says, that even when they have food, they often do not eat because of the intensity of the odours. It’s a stark insight into the difficult circumstances women encounter here.
The importance of having access to fresh clean running water here cannot be underestimated. For women to give birth without it seems an affront – absurd on many levels – for the women and for the nurses and clinicians ensuring the safe arrival into the world of a new generation of Malawi’s children.
The women here face a difficult decision. A choice between leaving their villages to spend a month in a facility with no water but where there is medical support – or give birth at home where they might be many kilometres from that care.
“Staying here is the lesser of two evils,” says Khisse. “We are choosing between risking life and risking unpleasant living conditions. If we stay at home, the risk is that the labour could start and there would be no way that we could make it from the house to get here – and that could lead to loss of life.”
Work will begin next year to ensure change is on the way for this facility – and others likes it, serving rural and remote communities across the Zomba and Machinga regions.
I was in Malawi with WaterAid to see how water and sanitation projects benefit from funds raised in Scotland by employees of Scottish Water.
The international charity is about to embark on an ambitious plan to work with the communities and health facilities to improve access to clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene management.
The project will help bring clean water to communities to enable women to give birth in safer conditions and with more dignity than is the case without water.
When the water arrives in any village, there are bright, colourful, beautifully melodic, vibrant celebrations. They will be all more joyous when the cry of a new-born baby joins in.