New England, same old problem

WHO's 2008 World Health Day banner

The 50-year-old crumbling cave well that has become a death trap

One of the first people to come to me with a story idea at The Exclusive was Musa Sesay. He wanted to do a follow up on a recent unfortunate incident at the New England village where a 16-year-old girl had been crushed to death by a runaway boulder while fetching water. The 30,000 residents of the area all depend on one solitary cave well for water and every rainy season there are casualties due to landslides. The burgeoning populace has built their homes on the edge of the hill causing both sewage and debris to seep into the water supply.

Musa explained to me that the current government had promised the people of the area access to water but had not lived up to it. I was a bit suspicious when he pitched the story. Did he want to discredit the ruling APC government through this story? I had been warned that reporters in Sierra Leone were fiercely partisan and that The Exclusive’s sympathies lay with the Sierra Leone People’s Party that was currently in opposition.

But I soon realised that Musa was genuinely interested in highlighting the problems of the people. The residents had been forsaken both by the government and the city’s multiple NGOs. In 2008 the World Health Organisation used a picture of the area on their poster for World Health Day. But since then there’s been no further contact with them.

The site of the incident, the well itself is a dark square hole in the rock and is the scene of a fight over water every morning. Since the authorities have done nothing to help, the local residents have organised into a self help group called Water Is Life and charge the community members a small fee to help maintain the well. But this is not nearly enough, the water from the well is untreated and cases of diarrhea and typhoid are common. Some months back both the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor visited the well and asked for an estimate of how much it would cost to carry out some renovations. It was estimated that it would only cost about $7,000 to make the well safer for drawing water and provide a supply of drinking water. The city council is yet to get back to them.

While walking back to town I noticed that we were across the road from The Special Court for Sierra Leone which had been set up in collaboration with the United Nations to try civil war criminals. This heavily fortified compound costs millions to maintain and some within the county wonder where this money could have been put to better use.

Musa’s story was an immediate hit and he’s already received requests from two other local papers to reprint it. I am delighted because as reporters realised the impact their stories can have, they will be eager to work on more.