Community hygiene, human dignity
Philippa Garson
The story of Kheis is a story of a community’s shift from shame over its predicament to pride after the arrival of a couple of basic services that most of us would take for granted. When decent water and sanitation facilities were introduced to the impoverished inhabitants of a dusty village in Namaqualand, the community’s collective spirit lifted.
The people of Kheis, whose closest town is Springbok, 120 kilometres away, were relocated from the Swartland area during apartheid-era forced removals. They now survive on goat and sheep farming and on income from those family members who have managed to find work elsewhere.
Before Mvula Trust, South Africa’s largest water and sanitation NGO, moved in to help them, the 120 families of this tiny rural settlement relied on a sporadic fresh water supply and “the bucket system” to remove their sewage.
A few years ago the government installed a mobile desalination plant to remove the salt from the community’s drinking water.
But the results were not entirely successful and the community was forced to go for long periods without fresh water.
The people of Kheis also relied on the archaic “bucket system” for sanitation: the municipality would come intermittently to remove waste by tractor. Buckets would overflow, sewage would be dumped behind houses where children played, and more often than not a stench pervaded the village.
The Kheis community reported feeling embarrassed when people came to visit.
The Kheis community school now has clean sanitation facilities
Health problems like diarrohea, scabies, eye infections and a high incidence of TB were the norm, says Maria Wildschutt, a retired teacher from Kheis. Known as “Juffrou”, 66-year-old Wildschutt has been the driving force behind efforts to solve the community’s problems.
In the mid-1990s Mvula Trust
was brought in to sort out the water problems. Pipes were laid and water pumps were installed. Soon water will be piped directly to each home.
In 1997 the Department of Water and Forestry appointed Mvula Trust to address the community’s sanitation problems. Demonstration pit latrines and urine diversion toilets were set up and a slow, careful process of education began.
“At first the urine diversion toilets were seen as a strange concept”, says Riana Terre Blanche, a consultant for Mvula Trust. “But gradually interest has grown.”
Wildschutt took to visiting several families every day, teaching them basic hygiene and showing them the benefits of clean toilets and of washing hands and keeping flies away by closing toilet doors and lids.
Now the school and homes have clean sanitation facilities and faeces is neutralised with ash from the community’s bread baking ovens.
According to Wildschutt, who also administers the DOT (directly observed treatment)
system to tuberculosis sufferers, the incidence of TB “families” is down from 12 to one. Generally, health and hygiene in the village is much improved.
“It was important that the project wasn’t dumped on them,” says Terre Blanche. “Now everything has improved. People have got back a sense of self-worth and self-esteem. They have taken control of things themselves.”
Philippa Garson has written for over a decade, on a range of issues, for some of the country’s leading newspapers. The former editor of The Teacher, the national newspaper of the education profession, she was named South Africa's Education Journalist of the Year in 1996.
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