Reflections on Water - Past and Present

Our Lifeline for the past few weeks

At last - the water is back albeit at reduced pressure which means no showers, but let's be thankful for small mercies as dear old Ma used to say. And the joy of having water to wash, flush, run the dishwasher and washing machine and mop the manky floors knows no bounds!

I hadn't realised how much I'd taken water for granted till spending this Christmas without it - and surviving. It's been well over 20 years ago, when we were living in Burigi in Northwest Tanzania in the heart of the bush between Lake Victoria and Rwanda, with the two oldest and the third on the way, and we had no running water at all.  We lived on rainwater (in the rainy season of course) collected in drums and a specially built tank, and river water did for the dry season and our clothes washing. Nappies were always a darker shade of grey and everything was tinged with a sludge-coloured hue. We only realised this when we were back in Ireland and saw how technicolour everyone else was compared to our au naturel shade of safari gear.

The boys on driftwood at Bahari Beach Dar-es-Salaam - looking out to Zanzibar-1994

Yes, those were the days - and we were loving it! Must have been the vigour of youth that kept us going, and the fact that we were totally thrown back on our own resourcefulness to get by. We were very stoic and nothing fazed us, even the dreaded malaria which landed hubby in our local mission hospital on a few occasions. We had to boil and filter all our drinking water, as it was very muddy from the river and the chalk filters had to be cleaned almost daily. So we certainly didn't take water for granted- and as we had a pit latrine which didn't require flushing we had no worries on that score. Not as awful as it might sound, these pit loos are a terrific solution for any area of water shortage and are a lot more environmentally friendly - as long as they're not leaching into any water supply.

I have some terrific pics of the boys at bathtime outside our house, as all ablutions took place in a makeshift shower hut, with bucket showers. They are sitting in a yellow plastic tub in the sunshine, and as happy as sandboys. I don't think they were overly traumatised by the lack of mod cons, as they knew no different, having been born and reared in the bush. But we often longed for a decent shower and a highlight of our time there was trips to the Dutch doctors in Rubya Hospital in Muleba where we could chill out and shower at length safe in the knowledge they had plenty of water and a hydroelectric plant in the making from the abundant waterfalls in that elevated region.

We had friends in Bukoba town and visiting there meant a surfeit of water, and an illicit swim in Lake Victoria which was out of bounds as far as the tropical docs in Ireland were concerned. This was due to the risks of contracting Bilharzia or Schistosomiasis, which was transmitted via the snails that lived in the water and were vectors of the disease. We occasionally took a chance, hoping that our years in the bush had given us an acquired immunity from all kinds of parasites, as the missionaries and other expats took a laid-back approach to it all.

I guess everything is relative and compared to the refugees we were living amongst and working with, our lives were very comfortable and we had that option they never had - a sanctuary back in Europe if the going got tough and security inadequate. So perspective certainly kept us going as a coping strategy - no matter how rough we thought things were, they were never as rough as the lives and experiences of the Rwandan Tutsi refugees - who are now back in their own country after a lifetime of exile in Uganda and then Tanzania. But that's a story for another day.

We were always used to boiling water abroad, as the only place we ever drank tap water was in Zanzibar, where the aquifers are deep enough to be clean. In Bangladesh water is potentially lethal as the tubewell water is naturally tainted with arsenic, This was not known in our day there 30 years ago, but has since come to light. It's particularly ironic in a country that has such a love-hate relationship with water that this should happen - after all, the Cholera hospital in Dhaka invented the Oral Rehydration solution that we're so familiar with in the West now.

We are looking down the barrel of water metering in Ireland with inevitable charges - hubby is amazed that we have free water here when every other European country seems to be charging for it - but our attitude seems to be why should we have to pay when we have an over-abundance of rain in this damp climate. I guess it's all down to the cost of treatment, which is a luxury we do take for granted, especially when the boil notices appear and ghastly things like Cryptosporidium turn up in Galway and are traced back to the water source. I hope that our mega-leaking ancient pipes here will be given priority for repairs as there seems to be as many litres leaking away per hour as we owe the IMF in Euro in the coming few years.

Of Books and Book Clubs

I have been a member of a Book Club in Lismore for the past nine years, and it has opened a window to a world of books and authors that I might otherwise never have read. I have always loved reading and was a prolific reader growing up as an only child - Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven, as well as her school series, Richmal Crompton's "William" books, the "Jennings" school series, Billy Bunter, "What Katy did" series, Charles Dickens, Little Women, and many more. I was pretty eclectic and read comics and annuals which I still have and the kids have enjoyed - Beano and Dandy with their beloved Dennis the Menace and his trusty pets Gnasher and Rasher, and Desperate Dan with his cow pie, and the more girly comics like Bunty, Judy, and June and School Friend. We then moved on to teen mags like Fab 208, which celebrated the long-defunct Radio Luxembourg, which introduced my generation to pop culture as much as BBC Radio One did some years later. Ireland had a long way to go to catch up on the rest of the world, with the clergy decrying the evils of rock'n'roll and groups like the Beatles from the pulpit at every opportunity.

Then I went through the chick-lit years of Patricia Scanlon and Maeve Binchy, and read all of James Michener during the 70s and 80s, and living in Africa and Asia led to books with those settings, like Kipling and M.M. Kaye's Indian books, and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. The African books included everything from Wilbur Smith's historic novels to Thomas Pakenham's Scramble for Africa, which I already wrote about here, to accounts of the Rwandan genocide which was very close to our lives. In case this all sounds dreadfully worthy and dull, I read all of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole books, and still love Ross O'Carroll-Kelly's running autobiography penned by his alter ego Paul Howard. They are a peculiarly Irish phenomenon and many of you may not know them - but they are hilarious! They incorporate a whole new world of Irish rhyming slang which probably take some lateral thinking to fully comprehend (e.g. " Roy" = eager - as in Roy (sometime Irish soccer player) Keane = keen. I know, it takes some local knowledge but this site helps!). Given that Ross was invented as a send-up of the worst types that unearned entitlement threw up in the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, and was adopted as a hero by the very people he was spoofing, with a total lack of irony, says a lot for the shallowness of same tiger cubs! I am just finishing off the newest book - We need to talk about Ross - and enjoying it as a light summer laugh.

I wanted to name some of the book club reads we had lately, as we have a list up to 2005 and thereafter it's guesswork. We each select a book for discussion and the only criteria is that the selector must have read the book, and it is in print and in paperback.

About our Book Club

We are not affiliated to the library book clubs that have sprung up around Ireland but are a group of women from diverse backgrounds who like reading and got together to start the book club ten years ago. Men aren't banned (we're not sexist like some golf clubs!) but it was decided at the outset that partners and husbands wouldn't join, just to avoid any inhibitions I suppose - books could be a flashpoint if there were wildly varying opinion and we didn't want anyone holding back. It can get quite heated at times, and we all love a lively debate.

We meet on neutral ground which is currently a room above a local pub. This is in contrast to a lot of book clubs which meet in the members' houses on a rotating basis. I have to confess a preference for our method for a variety of reasons, as follows:

Advantages of meeting on neutral ground

• It gets us out of the house on a weeknight - we meet up on a Monday each month in a room above a local pub.



• It removes the status anxiety inherent in having the book club at home, perhaps tidying up, dispatching kids and partners from the room and generally ensuring a child and man-free zone - not an easy task in today's open-plan homes.


• It prevents grandstanding in the cookery/baking/snacks stake.



• We can have a nice cuppa tea or coffee or a glass of wine or whatever we like, depending on mode of transport home - for me, that's walking.



• We don't have to get all glammed up as it's not like we're going clubbing or to the theatre, so smart casual is as fashionable as it gets.



• There is no danger of anyone eavesdropping if scintillating gossip is being shared.



• We enjoy the camaraderie of shared interests and female friendship.
  
  
• All of us have such busy lives it is crucial to have an interest that extends into totally new territory.
  
  
• We get to borrow books from each other and read new writers - I found Sue Miller , Barbara Kingsolver and Barbara Trapido here, and am very grateful!



• We have a good excuse to have a big night out occasionally - usually a good meal out in January to combat the post-Christmas blues.
  

Disadvantages

• We don't get to snoop at other members' houses.
  
  
• We don't have a nice meal/cakes/snacks every month in home comfort.

I can't think of any other drawbacks - if you can, all comments welcome!

I have reviewed a number of books on Living Social and Library Thing which I will try to link. Library Thing is a sidebar widget on this blog so look it up and add it to your blog as it is a great resource. I review books not as an ego trip to show how clever I am but because I forget so quickly what I have read and it is a way to recall the delights of an enjoyable book with my appalling retention - I have difficulty remembering the last book I read so it focuses the mind to review them and if it is read by other readers that's a bonus, not the intention.

I had the pleasure albeit embarrassing at the time of having a book review read by the author who turned up as a speaker at Immrama in 2008. We had read Blood River by Tim Butcher and had a great discussion on it, as we had all pretty much unanimously decided that Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was a group favourite and this was also set in the Congo, over 40 years later. Tim read my review on Facebooks Living Social application, and was very gracious about it, lucky it was a positive one!

The recent books in no particular order include the following list:

• Stasiland - Anna Funder



• The March - E.L. Doctorow



• The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford (my selection - love the Frank Bascombe trilogy)



• Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami



• The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry (Brilliant Irish novel, very fact-based events)



• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf



• The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion



• Dreams of my Father - Barack Obama



• Stealing Water - Tim Ecott

Of these, I did not enjoy The March as American Civil War books just don't appeal to me. Nor did the Murakami book which was the first of his I'd read, just too anarchic and soulless, and while it seems churlish to speak ill of the dead, I found the Joan Didion book way too hard to even read as she had to deal with way too much grief for anyone to bear at one go - husband keeling over after dinner and adult daughter on life support following catastrophic brain damage. Her book was probably cathartic and made a wonderful stage show by all accounts but it was hard going for this reader.

I loved the others. Stasiland was a brilliant insight to the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in the former East Germany and inspired me to see the film The Lives of Others (Das leben der Anderen) about the paranoia and the impact of the state on ordinary people which must still resonate today.

Sebastian Barry's book was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and as we say in Ireland - he was robbed - but then he won the Costa prize and that was a vindication of a brilliant book. It was criticised for a twist at the end but I felt it didn't detract from the book even if it was a bit too contrived. Many Irish people were locked away from society in asylums, if they were seen as a threat by being different or anti-establishment. We have a long history in that whole area - I wrote about the Ryan report on Institutional Child Abuse here and this was another sorry saga in our dysfunctional collective psyche.

Richard Ford has written three great American novels in the Frank Bascombe Trilogy and I have reviewed all of them on Living Social here. He is up there with the great contemporary writers like John Updike in his Rabbit books and Philip Roth with the Zuckerman books.

We have a long Russian read over the summer recess - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I have yet to get it and while it is online at Gutenberg project website I don't think I'd have the stamina to read such a weighty tome on my laptop! We have yet to embrace the Electronic book readers like Sony and Kindle in Ireland - in fact I don't think Kindle works here even if you got it on Amazon.

Perhaps that will be the next big thing and the prophets of doom will be predicting the end of the written word as we know it, but if the internet hasn't destroyed the book industry I doubt if it'll fall prey to the e-book readers. There will always be the pleasure of the physical sense of a book, and like newspapers online, there is no way that I read the Irish Times in the same detail online as I do the print edition. I have stopped buying the daily paper though, as I realised I was often only reading the preferred features and skimming the news anyway, and now I do that online but still buy the Saturday edition for the magazine and the Weekend review supplement.

One of the joys of the Immrama Travel Writing Festival is the opportunity to buy a lot of books of the presenters and get them signed, items to treasure long after they are read.

This is long enough for a literary reflection - if you have any recommendations let me know - there are plenty of avid bookworms out there and I would love to have some more book-posts in my blog but there's no point in blogging on books if it eats into reading time.

Reflections on Africa - tribalism and colonialism

Years ago (1994) we travelled to Zimbabwe by train from Makambako (between Iringa and Mbeya, our nearest TanZam station) for an overland holiday with our three boys. We only got to Victoria Falls and had a wonderful week there, staying in a hotel with a pool for 3 days and in a town council holiday cottage in the middle of town for the remaining days, as the hotel was a bit outside our then frugal budget.

What I remember vividly about the train journey was the book I read to while away some of the 36 hours trip, Thomas Pakenham's "Scramble for Africa" , which looks at the vast, then virtually unknown continent at the time of the colonial scramble between the 4 colonial powers of England, Germany, France and Belgium. From an Irish person's perspective what fascinated was the realisation that if Gladstone wasn't so preoccupied with "the Irish question" he would have backed Stanley's quest for the navigability of the Congo river, and not left it to King Leopold for Belgium.


Indeed the course of history would have been very different in the area as if Belgium hadn't already a foot in the door with Congo, they wouldn't have been "given" Ruanda-Urindi (present-day Rwanda and Burundi) as part of the carve-up of the former German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in the wake of World War 1.


Just goes to show what the consequences of one action or inaction can be. In the case of Rwanda these have been devastating, and the complexity of the situation there that culminated in the genocide of 1994 is impossible to condense in a few lines of a blog post. Suffice to say that the colonial masters have a lot to answer for in this instance, which is not to exonerate the Interehamwe perpetrators of the genocide.



The Belgian policy of divide and rule perpetrated the existing gulf between the Bantu Hutu and the Nilotic Tutsi who were seen as more "European" looking by the Belgians, who favoured them in education and employment opportunities. This festering resentment boiled over as soon as independence arrived and the first of many genocidal massacres took place around 1959.

The account of the events of that awful year are told in many books, from many angles, and a film has been made - Hotel Rwanda - which gives an accurate portrayal of one aspect of the bravery of individuals. The refusal of the Western world in general and the US in particular to use the genocide term was one of the damning indictments of Clinton's administration, as that would have meant an international intervention, other than the ineffectual UN response, which was miniscule compared to that in former Yugoslavia around the same time. General Romeo Dallaire was one brave man heading up the UN forces who was thwarted every time he attempted to raise the issue of complicity of some Western governments, and the need to empower the UN to be peace enforcers not just peacekeepers.



Other books that recount the events for posterity are Philip Gourevitch's chillingly factual "We wish to inform you tomorrow we will be killed with our families"; Dervla Murphy's account of visiting her daughter and family in Goma in the wake of the genocide in "Visiting Rwanda", and Fergal Keane's (former BBC World Service African correspondent) "Seaon of Blood - a Rwandan Journey" . I have read these and can recommend them, they are compulsive reading for anyone interested in trying to understand African tribalism and the devastation of colonial fallout. I have not read Dallaire's book "Shake hands with the Devil" but it sounds compelling; he left Africa a broken man after what he had witnessed, and it might put into perspective the constraints the beleaguered UN peacekeepers work under, their mandate of non-intervention made them targets for internaional opprobrium, and probably led to changes in their approach to crises in Chad and other global conflict zones.

A more recent book that I read and loved was "Blood River", by Tim Butcher. This is an account of his journey along the Congo River in the footsteps of Stanley, and we were lucky to meet Tim last year when he spoke at Lismore's Immrama Festival of Travel Writing. He recounts the destruction of that country under the despotic Mobutu regime and, sadly, history seems to be repeating itself in Mugabe's reign of terror in today's beleaguered Zimbabwe.

We lived in Tanzania during the Rwandan genocide and worked closely with the volunteers on the ground in the refugee camps in the border Kagera region, which were largely filled with the fleeing perpetrators - a moral and ethical dilemma that challenged the humanitarian ideals of everyone involved. Do we assist the perptrators or do we treat them as they treated their fellow-countrymen and women and children? I don't have the answers to this question, I don't know if there is one.