I watched 11,000 litres of clean water pumped into the jerry cans and plastic bottles of a cholera-affected community today. Not very often that you get to say that.
But as has been the case for this whole trip, all wasn’t what it seemed.
Whilst a group of people lined up at the distribution point to collect water, still more were huddled around the nearby borehole despite the water there being contaminated.
Raphael Bonnaud is with the French Red Cross water team. “People still prefer the bore water, even though we have explained that it’s not clean.
“But they don’t like the chlorinated taste of the clean water, and they’ve been collecting water from there for years, so there’s a behavioural element to it as well.”
It’s another sign of how complex this operation is, and of the importance of health and hygiene awareness raising.
We were in Chitungwiza, a high density suburb on the outskirts of Harare and home to one of the first and worst outbreaks of this ongoing crisis. It’s not hard to see why. Driving through the townships, houses seemed to be built on top of each other. Few if any have running water or sanitation.
The local water authority is stretched beyond capacity, undermined by a lack of chemicals and faulty pipes. According to yesterday’s paper, about 45 per cent of the water that is produced is lost to leakages.
To try and arrest this situation, we have set up a treatment plant at the Prince Edward water plant. We’re producing about 50,000 litres per day of high quality water.
Our first stop this morning was the Zimbabwe Red Cross headquarters in Harare for an update on the operation and the situation. The first part was encouraging. We’re on our way to meeting most if not all of our preliminary targets ahead of schedule.
But the crisis roles on. Two provinces – Masvingo and Mashonaland Central – have experienced a four fold increase in cases in just the last two weeks. In Midlands Province, the number of cholera deaths have almost tripled.