Tapping Into A Water Problem Half A World Away

By Nancy K. Crevier

When you are thirsty in America, you walk to the sink, turn the tap, and refresh yourself with a clean, cold drink of water. When you are feeling grubby in America, you jump into the shower and let gallons of hot water wash over your body and pour down the drain. When your clothes are dirty, you toss them into an electric washing machine that scrubs away the grime in sudsy water — in America.

There are places in the world, though, Paul Kastner will tell you, where water is a far more precious commodity than it is in America.

Paul is a 2002 graduate of Newtown High School and current student at Worcestor Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He returned to Newtown from an 11-week sojourn to Namibia, Africa, on May 21. It is a poor, drought-ridden area of the world; a place where one of the necessities of life — water — is at a premium.

As part of degree requirements at WPI where Paul is pursuing a degree in electrical and computer engineering, students are required to develop a half semester project that teaches the social implications of technology. Students work outside their field of study to gain real-life experience.

“I learned a lot more about another part of the world than I would have at a semester in Massachusetts,” says Paul.

Guidelines for the project are supplied by WPI, but specifics of the project are developed by teams of four students, who often travel to one of the more than 20 project centers around the world established by the institute.

Windhoek, Namibia, is one of those project sites, and it was in this city of approximately one-quarter-million people that Paul’s team chose to investigate problems associated with the metering of water in the community. Water is not free.

In the outlying settlements of Windhoek, if you want water, you must obtain it from communal standpipes. The Department of Infrastructure, Water and Technical Services in that city currently struggles with a socially inequitable billing system. Some settlements use a monthly billing system, in which those who fail to pay their monthly bills are subsidized by those who do pay, and some settlements have been experimenting with a prepay system.

The prepay system requires citizens to use a prepaid credit card to obtain water from the regulated communal standpipe. Among other issues, the inability of residents to obtain water if their card runs out of credit outside of point-of-sale location hours is of grave concern.

“It becomes a human rights issue,” says Paul, “if people in prepaid areas can’t get water.”

Through interviews with community members and a survey, often relying on translators of the native dialects and commonly spoken Afrikaans, Paul and his team hoped to investigate the advantages and problems with the two metering methods, and provide recommendations to the City of Windhoek.

Paul was surprised at the support the Windhoek Department of Infrastructure provided his team.

“They were very receptive to the project, helping us find documents and maps, driving us out to the settlements. A lot of them seemed impressed that American students would come all this way to work for free,” he says.

The in-depth survey, which covered everything from demographics to economics to maintenance of the water standpipes, gave the City of Windhoek feedback they did not have the workforce to assess.

The WPI project center established in conjunction with its sister school, Polytechnic of Namibia, and located in the inner city, maintains dorm-style living quarters for visiting students. There, running water and electricity create living conditions not so different from life in the United States, says Paul. But half an hour outside of the city, it is completely different.

“It was like nothing I’d ever seen — the magnitude of poverty. It was just thousands and thousands of people living in tin shacks as far as you could see,” he says. His initial response to the poverty was intense.

In his online journal, Paul related his reaction: “After the first half an hour I started feeling sick to my stomach. I’ve read about people in poverty and seen pictures, but it never seemed real until this morning. I felt very disturbed. I can’t remember ever having a physical reaction to something like this before. I barely talked or smiled for the next few hours.”

He goes on to say, “There is a contrast between wealthy and poor. Everywhere you go, there are barb-wire fences and electric fences to protect against theft.”

Begging was also rampant in and around the city, he and the 26 other WPI students discovered when they walked the city streets.

“They assumed if we were white, we had money. And it wasn’t the same as in the United States, you know someone looks crazy or homeless; these were normal seeming people in relatively decent clothes who just need money to survive.”

Besides tabulating results of the 43-question survey, Paul’s team spent their days looking at service records and invoices of repairs for the prepay meters, and estimating for the city how long it took to replace broken parts, as well as the cost to do so. They then provided the city with a report of their investigation.

But it was not all work and no play for the WPI student. A four-day safari break took him to the veldts of Africa. He saw elephants, lions, and giraffes — sometimes within ten feet of the tour van.

“We saw thousands of zebra,” he laughs. “So many, we got tired of seeing them.”

At the end of each sightseeing day, they slept in bungalows.

“They had electricity, running water, and air conditioning,” he says, admitting that they did not exactly “rough it.”

The final two weeks of his trip, Paul traversed the Orange River on the border of Namibia and South Africa via canoe.

“It felt pretty far removed from civilization,” Paul recalls. Huge mountains on either side of the river magnified the remoteness.

Back in the states, he feels a great amount of satisfaction concerning the success of the project. While the recommendations made by his team have yet to be implemented, the town is actively pursuing prepaid water meters in all of the settlements, based on information provided by Paul’s survey.

He says, “Our liaison said he wanted to do a larger study. This will give more support to continue the prepay program.”

Of the trip itself, “It was definitely a positive experience overall. I recommend anyone who has the opportunity, to travel to a developing country.”

And after weeks of mutton and rice lunches and other meat-heavy meals, Paul’s greatest delight right now is sinking his teeth into a good piece of pizza.