Water woes in East Africian nation an eye-opening experience

Emily Ridd is a 19-year-old former Feilding High School student who visited Malawi as a youth ambassador for World Vision.

OPINION: I’ve lived a pretty sheltered life here in New Zealand, so I don’t think I could have ever fully comprehended what it would be like witnessing the degree of poverty I saw when I visited Malawi late last year.

As I stepped off a sterile, air-conditioned plane onto the hot, dusty ground, I was confronted with the dire circumstances in which many people are living. It’s a stark contrast to the life I have here in New Zealand and seeing how challenging some things are in Malawi made me appreciate where I come from and what I have.

Malawi is a country battered by the impact of climate change; drought, floods and most recently, one of the longest storms in living history, Cyclone Freddy. The cyclone left half a million people displaced and a further five million children facing a humanitarian crisis.

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It’s a country with a struggling health system, exacerbated by a cholera outbreak, hunger, poverty, and five-and-a-half million people living without access to basic sanitation. And last, but not least, it’s a nation where 13 million people have no access to clean water.  

No one should have to drink unsafe, dirty water, but in Malawi this is the reality for thousands of people, every single day. Many children have to walk up to six kilometres each day to gather this dirty, brown and contaminated water.

This laborious task usually falls on girls, who skip their school classes to collect water that’s not even good for them or their families in the first place.

I found this so hard to watch. My upbringing was such a contrast to the girls, just a couple of years younger than me. Throughout my childhood, I had plentiful supplies of clean, safe water – I’d just turn on the tap and it was there.

Clean water is a basic human right – we all need it to survive. I struggle to come to terms with the fact that we have so much privilege in New Zealand, but the children I met in Malawi miss out completely.

I met Madalitso, a 10-year-old who lives in a remote village that is in desperate need of a clean water source. There’s no running water in her home. No taps she can turn on. ​

The closest source of water is a shallow well, but the water there isn’t safe. When she fetches water, she climbs inside the well, removes algae and draws the water out.

She is often sick from drinking dirty water. Her parents get sick too and can’t go to work on a farm.​ If Madalitso travels further to another clean water source, she is late for school, or misses school altogether.

In order to carry out basic household chores, Madalitso collects whatever water she can find – I watched her fish out the green bits floating in the water. She is aware that the water she collects every day isn’t good enough for washing, cooking, cleaning and bathing in – but she has no other option. It was heart-breaking to watch this.

A few days later I visited a community in stark contrast to Madalitso’s – where World Vision’s clean water programmes are saving lives. It’s a community that no longer gets sick from contaminated water. A community that no longer sees children forgo their education because their days are spent gathering water from bores lengthy distances away.

Here, I met 10-year-old Prisca whose childhood has been transformed by funds raised in last year’s World Vision 40 Hour Challenge. The organisation funded a new borehole in her village last year.

Prisca’s whole community was so grateful for the work World Vision has done to bring them a clean water source and made such an effort to show us just how much it means to them. They gifted us a chicken and a big bag of mangoes to say ‘’thank you’’, which was a huge honour.

My time in Malawi made me aware of just how much I take things in my life for granted – things like having a shower or drinking clean water.

I’ve always been driven by the knowledge that I have the ability to do something with my life that will help others less fortunate than myself. When I left school in 2021, I had ambitions to help others and I can truly say I am doing that through the work World Vision is doing abroad.

If nothing else, I want to contribute to hope. I think hope is such a beautiful thing in such a broken society. With so many things out of our control, there’s always the opportunity for things to turn around.

Hope for a better future for us and for those less fortunate than us.

It’s super easy to think ‘‘it’s not our problem’’– Malawi is over 12,000km away after all. But we’re all human beings and we’re all part of a global community.

The World Vision 40 Hour Challenge takes place from June 16-18, 2023. Find out more at www.40hour.org.nz