Silent Outrage

The water is clean, but the container is not. Piped in by gravity flow from over 20 miles away, this water has traveled far to get here only to be recontaminated in the very final stage before drinking. Containers like these were championed by government and large aid agencies as being better than open containers – the logic being that containers with a lid reduce the risk of re-contamination. That may be true, but only if you can fit your hand inside to scrub them clean on a regular basis.  Put a nice container like this in a dark, cool hut in the humid tropics and you have a near perfect breeding ground for bacteria, mold, and algae.  A very high percentage of containers I’ve inspected in 7 countries on the continent over the last 3 years have had some kind of film or crust on the inside, and the only recourse families have is to put pebbles and sand inside and shake vigorously.  Not exactly a sterile solution.

This is why research and field testing is so critical before technologies are released en mass upon developing countries.  In our consumer-driven culture, all it takes is a couple thousand people complaining about a faulty product and the manufacturer will do a mass recall.  The true injustice of poverty is that the poor have no such voice and there is no accountability for the tens of thousands of agencies that descend up developing countries with the latest and greatest in poverty “solutions”.

Imagine  how you’d feel if it the Brita water filter on your faucet was discovered to facilitate bacteria growth, contaminating your drinking water and making you sick and there was nothing you could do to fix it?  You’d be outraged.  Headlines would fly fast and furious and the public (not to mention the EPA) would demand a recall.  Brita would be forced to respond or sacrifice their reputation and lose valuable customers.  Yet this is what we do to the poor every day.

There will never be a product recall on the 1+ million yellow jerry cans that have flooded communities around the world; nor any of the other inappropriate solutions imposed upon people in developing countries.  The poor have no voice.  If there is to be any change in this, then the only recourse is for us to have the integrity to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard.