Restoring Water Systems: Water Against Inequality
by Beate Engelen
Restoring decaying water systems on the Loess Plateau in Gansu Province not only helps farmers get easier access to drinking water. It also reduces social inequalities between the water-rich valley dwellers and the farmers on the parched planes. In Ningxian County, Amity has shown that it can work.
Luo Xiaohong and her children in front of their cave home
Luo Xiaohong squats in her yard of rammed earth, handling a small patch of bright red chili laid out to dry. Her two small children, a boy and a girl, are dressed in clothes as red and bright as the chili in front of her. But this is where the colors stop. Everything else around is dusty, drab and tinged in a pale yellow. Luo Xiaohong’s family lives in a cave, carved out of a high cliff of tightly compressed yellow earth, typical for eastern Gansu Province, and sealed with a brick wall at the front. This is where she has lived since her wedding 10 years ago, and this is where her two children were born.
Many poor people in Dowan, a village with 366 households perched on the upper levels of the Loess Plateau in Ningxian County, still occupy such caves. The cliffs in the neighborhood are dotted with them. Recently, more and more people have moved out of the caves into houses and Luo Xiaohong has not given up hope that one day she will also move out, but severe poverty has so far cut her off from any of the modest material improvements some other villagers have enjoyed in recent years. As for now, she lives in this cave filled with one big bed, a few shelves for kitchen gear and several massive earthen jars.
The chilies she is drying in the yard do not earn her an income. What she plants will go to the family pantry, not to the market. Even though her husband earns some cash as a migrant worker, the remittances he is able to send back home have always been small. Every now and then he manages to buy some wooden planks or part of a fence. These are now stacked in front of the cave, waiting to be used as building material at some unknown point in the future. “Maybe some time, we can use this to build a house,” says Luo Xiaohong. A house made of mud and woven osier stakes. Life means hardship for her and many other people on the flat hill-tops of Eastern Gansu. Much of this has to do with the lack of water.
Poverty for hill-top dwellers
In Ningxian County of eastern Gansu Province, it is easy to tell the economic well-being of a family when you know where they live. Up on the planes, even the wealthiest families can serve meat at the table only twice a month. Owners of a cave home like Luo Xiaohong eat meat once a year during Spring Festival. Valley dwellers, by contrast, are much better off – for one main reason: access to water. Down in the valleys, where ground water rests near the surface, exploitation of the resource is cheaper and easier than up on the flat hill-tops. On the elevated planes of this extensive tableland, sinking a well deep enough to hit water is expensive and troublesome. If you happen to be born here, chances are high that you are dirt-poor.
On the hill-tops annual harvests solely depend on rainfall. Water in the deep wells pumped up from a depth of around 200 meters is not enough for farmers in Dowan to irrigate their eggplant and chili fields. But rainfalls are unreliable in Ningxian County. “Sometimes, we get rain twice a month, sometimes it doesn’t rain for months on end,” says Luo Zhanhu, the local village doctor. Besides all the worries about their harvest, people in Dowan are only able to wash their clothes or take a shower when there is rain. Luo Xiaohong’s family cannot take a bath during the winter months. Only in summer do they shower every other month. At least drinking water should be enough for people and animals because of the deep wells. But some communities do not even have deep wells.
Deteriorating infrastructure
In Dowan, Luo Xiaohong’s home village, there was none until recently. The people in Dowan had lost their village well to the forces of slow decay. Shabbily built decades ago and with no-one there to pay for maintenance, the walls of the well had eventually collapsed. The reason behind this decay and lack of initiative among villagers is rooted in the political and economic changes during the early years of Deng Xiaoping’s rule. In China, many parts of the rural infrastructure deteriorated after the end of the rural communes in the early 1980s. People welcomed the economic freedom that came with the waning influence and control of the central government at that time. What went unnoticed at first, however, was the creeping deterioration of the infrastructure that came with it. As the government pulled out, funds for maintaining older structures of the water systems dried up as well. Local cash sources, which could have built the village a new well, have always been meager on the high planes. A village like Dowan is certainly too poor today to pay for a village well.
After the well collapsed in Dowan, drinking water had to be fetched from wells in other communities. People had to walk for up to four hours to fetch water in the early morning hours. One of the young farmers from Dowan still remembers his dreadful walks before dawn through solitary woods and down the precipices to the valley floor to fetch water from the well of another village. He had to arrive at the site early if he wanted any water at all. People had to wait in line, Luo Xiaohong remembers, and if the well ran out of water, quarrels or fights broke out.
Restoring access
To help villagers in Dowan get access to water locally, Amity agreed to rebuild the well, 200 meters deep, and erect a water tower to store water and ensure the necessary water pressure for a water system to run smoothly. Building this water system and providing villagers with running water in their homes was the responsibility of the local government, according to the arrangement.
Farmers in Dowan fill a water cart at the well donated by Amity
Today, each of the 1650 villagers is entitled to use 20 liters per day from the well – a small amount compared with the national average (urban resident daily water consumption per capita was 211 liters, rural resident daily water consumption was 71 liters in 2007). In exchange, each family pays 10 yuan per month for the electric water pump and the salary of the man in charge of administering the pump, electricity and the water tower.
The amount of time Luo Xiaohong used to spend fetching water has been cut tremendously. Instead of walking more than four hours to the well of another community she now manages to do it in one. Now, she can spend more time on improving her situation. However, Luo Xiaohong’s worries are not yet over. A sewage system is not yet in place. Also, she and other people from the village have to haul big wheelbarrows with tin kegs fixed on top between the water tower and their homes.
Handling the water cart is sometimes too much for a woman like Luo Xiaohong who, most of the time, needs to do the heavy farm work and take care of the children, all by herself. Her cave home at the cliff is connected to the upper plane by only one way, a steep and narrow hollow way barely wide enough for the water cart to be pushed through. When it rains the passage turns into a slide. When that happens, she is hardly able to keep the barrow from racing into the abyss.
Even though she now spends less of her time fetching water, she might be in store for a few more rough months with her water barrow. The village heads have promised to build the water system in the near future. Like everyone else in the village, Luo Xiaohong will help to dig the water ditches. The pipes are paid for by the government. A water system would allow her to fetch water from a tap right above her cave home. The tap is already in place but it is still running dry.
For now, at least the water supply seems stable and accessible – one big step toward restoring part of the collapsed infrastructure of Dowan Village. Hopefully, in the near future, prosperity from water-rich areas will start trickling downward to the farmers on the planes.
