Anna in Nepal: Jhaukhel

The next day, we headed out to visit one of WaterAid’s peri-urban projects in the Bhaktapur area a few miles from Kathmandu. We were told that the area that we’d see was a typical suburban town – ten years ago access to these towns would have been really difficult and it is only in recent years that some areas have received improved access to water and sanitation. We visited the region of Jhaukhel – a VDC made up of several villages spilling over into each other to make a town on the outskirts of Kathmandu. I could see why this was classed as a peri-urban project, as although there were a lot of dwellings, the surrounding area was full of fields and lots of people were outside working on the land outside their houses. The water and sanitation project throughout the district had been initiated in early 2010 and was due to run for three years, with plans for a range of improvements. The water supply in the area is poor – around 40% of the households have some access to a private tap but others depend on conventional sources, which are rarely safe. In one cluster of houses, it was found that only 7% of people had access to a piped water supply. Around 87% of people in the area have access to a toilet, but when a survey was conducted it was found that the sanitary condition of most of these is very poor, with some parts of the community having around a third of people not being able to access a useable toilet. I chatted to the staff from ENPHO as we made our way to the area, and found out that almost a third of the population of the area suffer from diseases that can be related to poor WASH access – from diarrhoea to dysentery and even pneumonia from poorly sanitised kitchen facilities.

The first cluster of homes we visited was called Mallepati. It looked like a big old fashioned house, but I later found out that this was home to a number of families all living together – around 10 families. We were shown through to the back of the house to a cluster of newly improved latrines. The area behind the housing had previously housed a few latrines that were not often used and had to be emptied by hand. With only a limited number of toilets, when they were full and needed to be emptied, they were often left and open defecation was common. Now there is around one toilet per family. WaterAid’s partner in the area ENPHO provided the ring, pan and cement and then the new toilets were constructed 3 months ago, after community members had been trained in maintenance and also attended workshops on health and hygiene management. All toilets were then built in a week.

I asked one of the women if there had been an improvement in their health in the last few months since the build and she said that before, the temporary latrines had been dirty and often make the children sick. Now, the permanent structures are secure and easy to keep clean – they are safe and easy to use. She said that the direct issues are not so different just yet in terms of health, but what she can see is a huge behavioural difference. The families take pride in the latrines and understand the link to their health. She beamed as she told me how happy she was to have the toilets.

We then walked down a little further into the town, where we stopped at another house to visit an Ecosan toilet. I’d never seen one before and the structure of it was really impressive, how the waste is divided into compartments, with each compartment securely sealed off once it is full and then dried out to make compost fertilizer. The lady who showed us around her toilet had recently trained on an ENPHO project locally as a health volunteer and told us how she had visited each household in the cluster with hygiene and health information. It was incredible to again see the commitment right across the community to take the health and sanitation issues seriously.

Jhaukhel is one of the first communities in the area to focus the WASH work on particular marginalised groups within the community. There are almost a hundred disabled people living throughout the VDC and the infrastructure to support these people is not sufficient to allow most of them access to a safe toilet. A big part of the first year of the project has been to assess the needs of these people in the community and work out some solutions.

Another area that has been identified for improvement in the area is school sanitation. We made our way to Sundarthali (meaning ‘beautiful place’) where we arrived at the local secondary school. It was a public holiday, so the school was quiet, but the Principal Shyam had arrived to show us the work that had been newly completed there. He proudly led us through the courtyard to a brand new boys toilet – with around ten urinals and a toilet cubicle. It was sparklingly clean, and Shyam told us that a cleaner visits every day to restock with soap and keep clean. He then led us over to the girls sanitation block, where there were two separate toilets. He was eager to show us the left hand one, and when he opened the door there was a small slot on the left hand side. He explained that this fed through to an incinerator, so girls could use this toilet to dispose of their sanitary pads. He was overwhelmingly proud to show us this, and I was quite overwhelmed too when I thought of the difference that this would make. Shyam told us that before the changes, there was just one toilet for use by all 100 students, boys and girls. He explained that before the incinerator, the girls simply did not come to school when they had their period, and missed out on a huge number of lessons. I thought about how fantastic this small intervention was. To be able to ensure that girls could stay at school, with confidence and stay healthy and clean at the same time was amazing to see. Shyam even said that before the new toilets, if a child had a stomach bug – often caused by drinking unsafe water – they would miss a lot of school. Now with the brand new clean toilets, they come to school to use the toilet – as it provides them a safe and clean place to go. Now, three out of four schools in the district have the pad incinerators, and the Department of Health and District Education Office have replicated this in the surrounding area with their own funds.

We made our way to the next part of the VDC – a short drive and then a long walk along a steep and bumpy path. It felt a little like we’d made our way into the countryside again, although I knew we were just a few miles from the big city. We arrived at Dhanda Gaun to a reception of waving, smiling children, who became a little shy as we approached. This community is a dalit community – or ‘untouchable’ – made up of the lowest social caste of people. It was incredibly obvious that this was the case as we looked closer. The children wore torn clothes and the houses were small, dark and crowded. A path behind one house led to some newly constructed steps – down an extremely steep hill to a kuwa – a local spring. ENPHO had built the steps just three months ago to give safe access to the water source. We walked down the steps towards the source – there must have been almost 200 steps and even they were incredibly steep. I looked at the surrounding hill and realised how dangerous it would have been to walk down beforehand – I couldn’t even imagine how it would have been if the ground was wet or slippery. We reached the bottom, and found some women from the village washing their clothes in one side of the spring. The other side was protected for drinking water collection. They smiled to us as they told us about how much better it was to be able to walk down the steps, and how they worried less about their children making their way up and down the path. A young teenage girl called Muna had stayed by my side all the way from the top. As we gathered at the bottom of the steps she placed her hand in front of my face and talked quickly in Nepali. Translated, it turned out that as one of the older children, Muna was often the one responsible for walking up and down the path. It was too difficult to carry a basin or collection pot on the route back up and she had regularly fallen and hurt herself. She’d even broken her fingers a few times. She held onto me and smiled as we made our way back up the steps. I thought about the things I had to worry about when I was twelve or thirteen and it made me incredibly sad that Muna had this huge responsibility, and angry that she had hurt herself so often. I’d written in lots of WaterAid200 emails about people in Nepal having to climb steep paths for water, but not fully appreciated how this could affect girls like Muna. I hoped that the construction of the new path really had made a change to her life and hoped that there were better things to come for her.

As we made our way back up the steps, I was almost out of breath. I’d consider myself pretty fit, but the combination of the steep stairs and the intense heat really took it out of me. I had no idea how anyone could manage to do this carrying anything at all, never mind a huge heavy pot of water. We chatted more to the group of children, and the two oldest told us that they had formed a child club to spread health and sanitation messages throughout the surrounding area. We spoke to a nine year old boy, Roshan, who had been to every household in the village to ask for a 2 rupee donation. The people had then used this money to buy paint to paint a health or sanitation slogan on each of the walls. I asked him what his favourite one was and he replied earnestly ‘Stay clean and let’s not open defecate.’ I imagined what would motivate or inspire a boy of the same age in the UK. There were no computer games, no days out for Roshan and what he displayed in maturity and awareness of the water and sanitation issues facing his family and his community was far, far beyond his nine years. It was humbling, touching and completely inspiring.