Anger Wells up at Poor Water in Northern Afghan City

Tuesday, 15 June, 2010

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Mohammad Saber Saffar

 Homayun, 26, sits in the shade of a wall in the main hospital for Parwan province in northeast Afghanistan, looking anxiously towards the children’s ward.

“I lost one of my children to diarrhea last year,” he said in anguish. “Now, my other child is also suffering the same disease. What if that one dies, too, God forbid?”

Homayun, a labourer from the city of Charikar, the administrative centre of Parwan province, located , some 60km north of Kabul, said he spent three days’ wages on medicines for the child.

The cause of the illness was perfectly clear, he said.

“There’s a stream in front of our house. People wash the dishes there. They even throw their rubbish in, and then we use the water for drinking, because we don’t have clean tap water or a well,” he explained. “The people are faced with severe problems because of this. The government does not care about the people.”

Residents say that the problem of polluted drinking water in Charikar was supposed to have been addressed by a project to provide fresh water.

Last year, the regional governor’s office, in cooperation with the American-run Provincial Reconstruction Team, PRT, agreed to drill four 350-metre-deep wells in four sections of the city.

The water is to be held in reservoirs and then pumped to homes via the mains system.

Officials said the 1.25 million US dollar water project would create a proper supply of drinking water by now, but so far less than a quarter of work has been done.

Some residents are still taking water from unhygienic sources, while others have to travel hours on foot to get to a spring or well and then carry the water home again.

Sweating profusely, 33-year-old Shaima and her two children were pushing a 25-litre bucket of water on a cart to their home in Charikar’s Sixth District.

She told IWPR she had to walk two kilometres to the Golghondi spring in the western part of the city, where she had to wait in line for a further hour to get her bucket filled.

“Some children have left school in order to fetch water for their families, using buckets and carts, winter and summer, and walking dozens of kilometres to get to the springs at Golghondi and Hofian.”

Locals say illnesses caused by polluted water are reaching crisis point in Parwan. Figures from the region’s environmental health department indicate that 300 out of the 400 patients registered daily at the provincial hospital are suffering from diseases linked to contaminated water, and most are under 18 years of age.

The diseases range from diarrhea and amoebic dysentery to skin diseases and other allergies.

Dr Nasrollah Timori, who heads the environmental health department, said Parwan’s 80-bed hospital could not cope with the number of cases.

He noted that 90 per cent of patients referred to private clinics in Parwan had also been affected by unhealthy water.

Timori said his department had repeatedly lobbied for action to be taken to provide potable water, but with little effect.

Health officials in the region say polluted water spreads disease not only when it is drunk, but also from being used to wash dishes, rinse fruit and vegetables, and even when people wash their hands in it. The number of cases goes up as the weather gets warmer.

Some blame a lack of coordination between donors and the contractors for the failure to deliver the water project on time.

Khwaja Rohollah Sediqi, deputy chair of Parwan’s provincial assembly, accuses the donors, particularly the PRT and the provincial council, of failing to coordinate and monitor the work.

“The main problem is due to the donors, because they haven’t been paying the contractor on time, so the latter slow down the work,” he said.

The building contractor, the Nawid Nuri Bagramwal firm, says it did experience some delays in payments, but did not hold up work on the project.

“It’s true we’ve had some problems receiving our money,” said a company official. “But we are from this area, so we appreciate people’s problems and thus we haven’t stopped working for even one day.”

He added that the fourth and final well would be completed in a month’s time and handed over to the water supply department for use.

Kyle Higgins, commander of the PRT in Baghram, said his office was fully informed of progress with the well project.

“So far as I know, most projects were delayed due to climate problems, particularly winter, but the financial problem, which existed to some extent, has been solved now,” he said.

Mohammad Qasim, director of the water supply network for Parwan, insisted that there were no technical hitches with drilling the wells. Three had been completed and water was already pumped from there to the reservoir.

However, he said, his water supply agency would not take over control of the wells until the fourth one was finished. At the moment, the working wells were supplying 2,600 homes, but this would increase to 156,500 once all the wells were connected into the mains network.

Although Afghanistan has extensive water resources, officials say only 20 per cent of the population has access to potable water.

Charikar has by four water sources – the Panjshir, Salang, Ghorband and Shatal rivers – but 70 per cent of their waters flow over the border to Pakistan, while the rest is used for irrigation by Afghan farmers.

Two canals flow through the centre of the Charikar, but they are badly polluted as people use the water to wash cars and carpets, and vegetable traders dump their spoiled produce there.

Some residents have to buy water to drink.

Abdol Basir, 25, a student at the Parwan institute of higher education, said his studies would suffer if he had to spend hours each day fetching water.

“We buy water from a tanker truck for three to five dollars every week,” he said. “That water isn’t 100 per cent healthy, and most people can’t afford it.”

Mohammad Khaled, 40, earns his living by selling water from a tanker truck, but says he does not make much of a profit. It is worst in summer, when people are more likely to take their own carts to fetch water.

Parwan residents say they are tired of hearing promises from officials.

As evening fell, Gol Aqa, 60, the village representative for the Parcha area, was still waiting for his grandson, who had gone to the Golghondi spring to fetch water.

“Although my beard is now white, I’ve never seen such inefficient government and officials,” he said, shaking with anger.

“We’ve heard many times that the water problem will be solved today or tomorrow,” he said. “The government congratulated itself five years ago, saying the potable water problem in Charikar had been solved. But five years have passed, and the problem is still there.”

Mohammad Saber Saffar is an IWPR trainee reporter in Parwan.