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DEVELOPMENT-ANGOLA: Absorbing Lessons on Clean Water

Penny Streather

LUANDA, Jun 16 2008 (IPS) - Playing happily in the sand with her twin sister, it's hard to believe Vivia Paulino was only months ago on the brink of death.

The six-year-old is one of thousands of Angolan youngsters who have fallen victim to cholera, spread by dirty water. Thankfully, she was lucky enough to be treated in time to make a good recovery.

According to UNICEF, almost 40 percent of Angolans use water from an unsafe source and water-borne illnesses are a key cause of diarrhoea, the second highest cause of death among children under five in the country.

Between January and the start of May this year there were 7,740 cases of cholera recorded in Angola and 198 deaths – that's more than a victim a day.

Little Vivia lives in the Boa Esperança – a musseque on the outskirts of the country's capital Luanda. The township sprang up in the early 1990s to house families who fled the fighting in the provinces. It is now home to tens of thousands of people living in breezeblock houses and metal shacks who all rely on water transported to communal tanks by government lorries.

The twins' mother, 47-year-old Ingracia Domingos, makes five trips to the communal tank every day, collecting 20-litre buckets each time which she carries on the head back to her small home. The single mother of seven, who also cares for four of her grandchildren, shrugs her shoulders and says: "The buckets are very heavy, but this is what we have to do and I am used to it."

Each bucket costs 30 kwanzas which means Ingracia spends around $2 a day on water, a serious strain on the household budget. That comes to $730 a year, more than some families pay in places like the UK. And the water Ingracia collects isn't necessarily clean as dirty buckets are dipped directly into the communal water tank by people collecting their daily supply.

Just 16 km away in the centre of Luanda, things are very different.

Cocooned from the wider reality in plush apartments, Angola's nouveau riche (and the wealthy expat workers here to share Angola's post-war oil and construction boom) enjoy filtered water pumped straight into their homes.

On June 12th, the state oil company Sonangol opened its new shiny headquarters. Built at a cost of more than $196 million, it is a marvel of modern engineering with 22 floors, two gyms, an observatory, a restaurant and of course, plenty of clean running water in every one of its marble bathrooms.

Vivia and her sister Edina are unlikely to ever step inside the Sonangol building and enjoy its copious water supply; they were born on the wrong side of the now-defunct Angolan railway track.

But while Boa Esperança is unlikely to get running water any time soon, the Angolan government is pouring huge amounts of cash into community education programmes and water treatment products.

After Vivia's illness, her family was visited by a UNICEF-trained health agent who taught them how to purify their water with a chlorine product. The bottles use beer caps as measurements – one cap for five litres, two for 20 – and then you leave the water for 30 minutes and it's ready to use.

Now, explained 21-year-old Ines Damião, Ingracia's eldest daughter, all the family's water is purified before it is used.

"We don't want to take any risks after Vivia was so ill," she said. "We even clean the water we wash ourselves with."

These health agents work from the town of Cacuaco which has the area's main health centre and cholera hospital, where Vivia received her treatment. Outside the cholera compound – little more than a collection of tents – a group of these health agents gathered to fill bottles with chlorine solution ready for a distribution roadshow in the nearby barrio of Kikolo.

Mantondo Candi Matos, head of health education in the municipality, explained there had been some cases of cholera in Kikolo so the team wanted to go there to make sure people were treating their water correctly. He said they would go to as many houses as possible to test families' water supplies and make sure they were using the chlorine solution.

The chlorine solution and the health agents who distribute it are paid for by the local health authority, some evidence that Angola's oil money is finally trickling down to those who need it.

Unfortunately, the health message itself doesn't always make it to those who need to hear it.

"Sometimes people get the bottles of solution from us and then pour it away so they can use the bottles to carry petrol to sell," he explained. "Even if people don't do this, sometimes they are too lazy to clean the water, that's why we have to keep going back to tell them how important it is."

But while a few people are ignoring the health messages and putting themselves at risk, nurse Berta Florença, who works with the cholera patients in Cacuaco, believes the distribution of the water treatment solution is making a real difference.

"We are seeing a lot fewer cases of cholera," she said. "Two years ago, there would be a lot of people, but now for instance we only have two people here getting treatment. "Part of this is because it's now the dry season, and there is less dirty water lying around the streets, but I think more people are cleaning their water at home and that is making a difference.

"The health teams have done a lot of work in this area and I think it is having an impact.

"I think Angola is finally winning the war against cholera."

Certainly, as the country enters its dry season, it can expect a drop in cases but it will remain until the rains start again to see if cholera can really be beaten in Angola.