Rosemarie North, in Dili
Coffee was the first obstacle Sebastiao Da Costa had to face when he and his Red Cross team started a water project in Edy, a community about two hours’ drive from Dili, capital of Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor).
The idea was to improve the health of people living in Edy by getting them to participate in building latrines and water systems, and to increase their understanding of basic first aid and hygiene.
The Red Cross would bring the bricks, iron bars, sand, plastic pans and expertise. The community of Edy would dig the holes, find the wood, help with construction and maintain the systems.
Decent water was a priority for Edy. The community had no safe, protected water source or latrines, and people here didn’t boil water or wash their hands.
A lack of safe water can be deadly. Globally, an estimated 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe water, and 2.4 billion do not have any type of sanitation facility. About 2 million people die every year from diarrhoeal disease, most of them children under five.
But the reality confronting the Timor-Leste Red Cross (CVTL) team was that people had to work to live. This after all, is Asia’s poorest country, where the per capita gross domestic product is US$ 478.
“During the pilot phase, one lesson we learned was that the community couldn’t always work, because of the economic situation they faced,” says Sebastiao, leader of the CVTL team, which comprised a plumber, driver and two brick-layers.
“If you do the project during harvest time, people sometimes can’t come because they have to go to collect the coffee beans,” he explains.
It would have been impossible for the Red Cross project team to unload all the heavy concrete blocks and pipes on their own, and carry them to sites several hundred metres up or down the steep hillside.
Plus, the whole point was for families to build the water systems and toilets for themselves so they understood how they worked, took ownership and were committed to using and maintaining them. Health education would back up the hardware with factual encouragement to change daily practises.
The Red Cross wasn’t sure how to proceed in Edy. But the village had the answer: a roster of workers, drawn up by the village. “We would come with a pickup or a car to bring sand and the community itself would organise how to bring the sand to the project site” Sebastiao recalls.
Even before the Timor-Leste Red Cross started the project, Edy community members committed to improving hygiene practices, attending first aid training courses, and establishing a fund to cover ongoing maintenance costs.
This commitment made the difference, says Sebastiao: “We never had a problem with it because the community asked for it, not us.”
So far, the cooperation has resulted in 11 finished latrines. Twenty-four more are under construction. The aim is to build 38, one for each family. The village now has three sources of safe water, piped securely into the main village and stored in tanks.
The strategy of community participation and decision-making, and using local resources, marks a change in strategy for the Red Cross, which has a 15-year history of water projects in Timor-Leste.
During conflict with the Indonesia army that preceded independence, working with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Red Cross staff and volunteers built emergency water and sanitation systems, or delivered relief water. But it hadn’t been possible to engage the community in setting up new systems.
Since May 2002, when Timor-Leste became an independent state, its Red Cross has moved from an emergency or relief situation to one of development.
“This programme is designed to build a commitment from communities like Edy to ongoing management of their new facilities, and to a sustainable change in their practices,” says Yuki Tanaka, the International Federation’s health delegate in Timor-Leste.
“These people are among some of the poorest in the world. And they lack even basic information about health. So we’re hoping the programme will really improve their lives in the long run,” she adds.
Before a water tank was built next to her home, Edy resident Maria Isabel, 29, or one of her six children had to walk several hundred metres to a creek to draw water. Understandably the family didn’t waste water.
Now that water is plentiful, she’s able to put into practice the lessons she learned during health education sessions run by volunteers from Edy.
“What did I learn? To take a shower every day, to give the children a shower, to clean the house. I feel it was useful information because it could stop us from being sick,” she says.
Maria says her children often have diarrhoea. The next step is a new toilet. Their latrine is nearly finished. It just lacks a roof. At the moment she and her six children climb a ladder and go to the toilet on bamboo slats above a pigpen.
Soon they will go to a cubicle with a built-in plastic pan, which empties into a covered tank. Red Cross plumber Afonso Alves says living so close to pigs isn’t ideal.
Apart from better health, there’s another possible spin-off from the project. For the past four months Crispin Baptista has been nurturing seedlings under a bamboo shade. Using water from a Red Cross water tank, he’s growing fruit trees, tea, and a kind of fir that provides building wood and fibre for ropes.
Crispin is growing the plants under a contract with the local government. Four months ago, before the water scheme, he was limited to growing beans and coffee. Since everyone nearby grew beans and coffee for themselves, he couldn’t sell what he harvested.
Crispin, a father of seven, is reluctant to speculate about whether the water might mean a better income for him and his family. “I don’t have any knowledge about the future. I am not an agricultural expert.”
He admits the water system has enabled him to grow these crops, but he says he still has to share the water with 10 other families.
There’s just one more problem Sebastiao is hoping the village will solve – when every family has a latrine, what will the pigs eat?