[With no formal water supply systems in many areas, people dig wells in their yards, boring deeper each time they dry up. With no public sewage systems, some also build septic tanks, but many simply dig latrines. As a result, well water sometimes mixes with sewage underground and becomes contaminated. Chemicals from construction or factories can also leach into the ground, giving the water a bitter taste.]
By
Pamela Constable
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Afghan
men and children fill water containers from a tap in Kabul in August.
(Wakil
Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
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KABUL — In affluent areas of the Afghan capital,
sky-blue vans make daily deliveries of huge plastic water-cooler jars, dropping
them at embassies, offices and ornate private homes surrounded by high walls.
“Water, clean and pure,” beckon the slogans on
each van. “Water is life.”
But in much of greater Kabul, where the
population has tripled to 5 million in the past decade, the quest for safe
drinking water is more arduous. Returned war refugees camp in muddy vacant
lots; trenches of fetid waste water run beside dusty, unpaved streets.
Apartment construction has soared, adding to the strain on old, overloaded
water and sewer services.
With no formal water supply systems in many
areas, people dig wells in their yards, boring deeper each time they dry up.
With no public sewage systems, some also build septic tanks, but many simply
dig latrines. As a result, well water sometimes mixes with sewage underground
and becomes contaminated. Chemicals from construction or factories can also
leach into the ground, giving the water a bitter taste.
“We dug very deep to get fresh water. It tastes
okay and the kids are used to it, but if we don’t boil it, my mother says it
makes her feel sick,” said Asif, a computer engineer whose family lives in a
neatly kept house off a dirt alley.
“The city is getting very crowded and there is
so much new building,” he said. “The system is very old and the government
can’t keep up.”
Several recent media reports have warned that
Kabul’s water is becoming dangerously contaminated, but government health
officials say that is an exaggeration. They estimate that 70 percent of the
urban water supply is safe. There have been scattered reports of more people
being stricken with diarrhea in hot weather this summer, especially children,
but no major outbreaks of water-related diseases have been reported.
Still, officials and experts expressed concern
about future contamination, especially with the metropolitan area growing so
fast.
A survey of household water connections in
Kabul by the National Environmental Protection Agency in March found high
levels of e-coli bacteria in 5 of 22 sites tested. The report said that 77
percent of the samples met World Health Organization standards, but that due to
a lack of chlorine and laboratory supplies, the scope of the survey was cut
back by half.
“We used to get a lot of support for
water-testing from UNICEF and the WHO, but that has ended. We are doing the
best we can, but now we have to wait for the government purchasing process, and
we can’t get spare parts for lab work,” said Mahmad Ali, a public health
official who oversees water testing and preventive health outreach. One order
for a 50 gallon drum of chlorine, he said, took 18 months to be delivered.
Teams of specialists from Ali’s office
regularly visit city schools and other public facilities, checking on health
conditions and sampling water from wells and pumps. On a recent day, the team
visited a large kindergarten program in west Kabul, where they quizzed the
children on their hygiene habits.
“When do you wash your hands?” asked Anisa
Popalzai, a health promoter. “Before eating!” a chorus of voices answered.
“Why?” There was a brief silence, then one boy ventured, “So germs won’t get to
your mouth.” Popalzai nodded and smiled, then demanded, “Who has clean hands
today?” Two dozen pairs of arms shot up, palms extended.
Popalzai asked the teachers if there had been
any recent cases of diarrhea among the 600 preschoolers in the large facility.
They said no, but she reminded them that in emergency cases, they could use a
mixture of boiled water, flour and salt to rehydrate young patients as soon as
possible. “For a child, diarrhea can be deadly,” she said.
Outside the classrooms, two other visiting team
members with checklists took water samples from the school’s outdoor pump and
put them in small bottles to be tested for bacterial and chemical
contamination. They also asked school officials how far the pump was from any
septic tanks, drains or animal waste.
Moving to the kitchen and bathrooms, they noted
with approval that the lunch dishes were being covered after washing, but they
frowned at a tangle of plastic garden hoses carrying water through weedy yards
to the kitchen and expressed concern that some toilets did not flush.
One inspector, Mahmad Daoud, said fears of
drinking-water contamination had given rise to sophisticated scams in which
discarded commercial water bottles were being refilled from wells, resealed and
sold as pure.
“We caught some people doing that, but they
threatened us and we couldn’t sample the bottles to prove it,” he said
ruefully. “There was nothing we could do.”
The irony of Kabul’s growing water problem is
that the capital is surrounded by sources of pristine water, including the
snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains in the distance and dams on powerful rivers in
two nearby provinces. President Ashraf Ghani has made dams a top priority; last
summer, with support from India, construction began on a long-delayed major dam
in western Afghanistan.
But delivering mountain and river water safely
to hundreds of thousands of households in Kabul is an expensive and risky
undertaking. They city has been damaged by decades of conflict and now faces
frequent bombings by insurgents, who have also attacked rural reservoirs and
dams. An ambitious, internationally-funded project to build pipes, reservoirs
and wells across the capital, launched two years ago, is still in the early
stages.
Sardar Wali Malikzal, director of the Afghan
Urban Water Supply and Sewer Corporation, is at the nerve center of this
effort. His office walls are covered with blueprints and pin maps showing new
or proposed water systems across the metropolitan area
Progress has been steady, he said, but
population growth and new construction — much of it unplanned and some illegal
— have been faster. Malikzal said that officials are starting to force builders
of large projects to provide modern water and sanitation systems, and that
numerous private companies have sprung up to dig wells and supply filtered
water to those who can afford it. But public piped water is still reaching less
than a fifth of urban households.
“Afghanistan has the best and sweetest water in
the world,” Malikzal said. “It is safe to drink, and we have a lot of it. But there
are 5 million people in the city now, and we all have to take responsibility.
Most diseases come from polluted water, so water needs to be filtered. Wells
and septic systems have to be standardized. The challenge is not the water
itself,” he added. It’s management, and it’s money.”
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