New Wells Spell Health for Local School

By David Snyder

Sitting behind a small wooden desk, his back to a chalkboard full of arithmetic, Abdul Quddus looks every bit the headmaster. And here in a small Bangladeshi village, where he has only four teachers to help him educate the 250 young students of the Dighoria Government Primary School, his problems extend well beyond math class. The last worry he needs is where to find a safe source of drinking water.

"There are tube wells here, but they are dry of water," Abdul says of Dighoria, a village that is cut off each year by the seasonal floodwaters that inundate western and central Bangladesh. Tube wells are drilled rather than hand-dug, which means they reach deeper to cleaner water.

"The children had to get water from a site about [650 feet] away, and they would go two or three times a day," explains Abdul. Though the walk was not far, each such trip took about 15 minutes, consuming on average 45 minutes of precious class time each day—the equivalent of one full class period. It was valuable time lost in a country with a 40 percent literacy rate.

Working through local partners Caritas Bangladesh, Catholic Relief Services set out to improve the lives of villagers in Dighoria through a range of water, sanitation and hygiene projects. The goal of Caritas and CRS was to repair existing tube wells and, where necessary, drill new ones, providing clean drinking water year round.

Though the village is surrounded by water each year, the underground water table is receding, making it more difficult to access clean water. One of the ten wells CRS dug reaches a depth of 130 feet, and sits a few yards from the door of the primary school. Because the school doubles as a flood shelter, those fleeing the rising waters each year will also have access to clean water.

But wells are only one part of the assistance CRS is providing here. Seeing the need for hygiene awareness, CRS and Caritas are training the teachers of the school in basic hygiene practices, reaching out to the community of about 10,000 people with messages of health many have not before heard. The goal: to bring about a change in unsafe hygiene practices not only during the flood season, but throughout the year.

"This week, [Caritas will hold] a school sanitation training for the teachers and the school management," Abdul says. "Those lessons will then be taught to our students—lessons like personal health care."

Each day, about 25 students are absent from class, some from illness and disease. Abdul says the CRS projects, launched in the summer of 2008, are bound to have a tremendous impact on the health of the Dighoria community, and especially among his young students.

"The result of the clean tube well water and hygiene training will impact our student's health," Abdul enthuses. "They will know how to create a hygienic environment."

David Snyder is a photojournalist who has traveled to more than 30 countries with CRS.