Boiling the Water

This morning, I went through the chore of boiling large pots of tap water, then pouring the thoroughly boiled water into a large, stainless steel filter device. From the filter, the water is poured into re-used plastic water bottles, then placed on the counter in the kitchen. We use this water for cooking – rice, or pasta – and for making coffee or tea. For everyday drinking water, I purchase “l’eau potable” from the nearby shop, eight liters at a time. I think I am drinking almost three liters of water per day.

Several conversations recently with various public health professionals, all foreigners, have followed the same pattern. I ask about their work in Congo, and they tell me. They ask about my research, and I tell them. Then they say, “but the real problem here is cholera.” In other words, the problem that none of us is working on.

It seems to me, coming from my Western/Northern/‘developed’ world perspective, that “cholera” actually signifies something more than just a disease. It may stand for “extreme poverty,” or the very odd term “under-developed” (as though a country were a piece of film or a photographic print, removed from its developing fluid too soon). It is a disease spread through water and human waste, among people living without what many parts of the world now consider to be “basic” sanitation: a functioning public water system, drains, and waste water treatment. It may be a disease we read about in history books, afflicting the workers who dug the Panama Canal, or newly arrived immigrants in 19^th century US cities, living in slums without modern sanitation. It is a disease we associate with disasters, the dreaded aftermath of a tsunami or earthquake, especially in poor parts of the world. The spectre of cholera was raised after Hurricane Katrina, and it felt like yet another piece of the frame painting New Orleans and its residents as somehow more “backward” than the rest of the US.

If you can forgive the slide into interpretation in the paragraph above, what seems most significant about cholera and about the places that suffer from it, is that this is a problem whose solutions are relatively straightforward, involving some major public infrastructure, to be sure, but not requiring a great deal of laboratory research or trial and error. And that is also the problem.

The son of the president of the Republic of Congo lives right next door to INCEF’s headquarters. Or, I should more accurately say he owns a large, walled compound of several elegant, whitewashed buildings next door. But the public water system in this neighborhood does not work most of the time, which is the case for every neighborhood in Brazzaville. INCEF has, in fact, its own reservoir for the house, and this reservoir must be refilled with water purchased from a private company that delivers it in a truck. This fact does not stop the city water company from delivering a bill every month. Nor should one drink any of the water that comes out of the taps, regardless of its source. I doubt the president’s son drinks tap water. I know I don’t.