ZUNISHA IS ONE IN A MILLION
The one millionth person to benefit from the Thirsty Planet/Pump Aid partnership is Zunisha Jane, a 35-year-old housewife from the rural Chiradzulu district of Malawi, where a Pump Aid Elephant pump has just been installed.
Like mothers everywhere she’s on the go all day. From Monday to Friday she’s on her own caring for her three lively boys aged 7, 8 and 12, and their baby brother, six-month-old Aduesai. Her husband has to travel to work in the town of Blantyre, coming home at weekends. Zunisha’s chores are much the same as mums’ in the UK - getting the kids to school on time, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, washing clothes, tending the vegetable garden and looking after the family’s animals.
The food she cooks may be unfamiliar to British families – the staple food in Malawi is nsima, a polenta-like dish made from maize flour. But the biggest difference between her life and her counterparts’ in the west until recently was the four or five journeys she had to make each day to her only source of water – a dirty, disease-ridden, unprotected well some two kilometres from her home. Zunisha had to walk on rough tracks through the bush with the sun beating down, carrying a heavy 20-litre bucket of water on her head four or five times a day. Before she could use the water for cooking or drinking she had to boil it up, if she had any firewood or paraffin for her small stove, to kill the bugs which could make the children seriously ill or even kill them. If she couldn’t boil the water she had to take a gamble and risk killing her boys with cholera or dysentary. There was no alternative.
Zunisha remembers being very sick with cholera many times when she was a little girl. A generation on her children were often ill, and the cost of getting treatment at the clinic put a strain on the household purse. And it’s not just the children who have been suffering. Zunisha’s friend and neighbour died a couple of weeks ago after drinking contaminated water.
Zunisha beams with excitement when she imagines life with a clean and disease-free water supply just a stroll away from her house. “Life will be much easier. My boys won’t be sick so they won’t miss out on school. I want them to get a good education as I’d like them all to be doctors. We’ll also be able to use the water to irrigate our garden so I’ll be able to grow more vegetables and we’ll eat more healthily. Tomatoes, that’s what I’m really looking forward to growing. I love tomatoes. I might even to be able to sell some which will help with the household budget and help to pay the school fees,” she says.