-EU, UNICEF bring succour to Akwa Ibom community
By Abu Veronica
Seventy-year-old Harriet Sunday has lived her entire life in Ikot Esop community in Nsit Atai local government area in the oil-rich Akwa Ibom State, South South Nigeria.
The community is home to more than a thousand four hundred persons and a majority of them are small-scale farmers and petty traders.
Tucked in the lighter rain forest stock , this settlement is the typical African setting of ages when the continent was known to colonialists as “dark” and of “hewers of wood and fetchers of water”.
Aside its beautiful scenery, Ikot Esop for centuries yearned for safe drinking water. As a young child, Mama, as Harriet is fondly called, said she dreaded waking up early and walking miles to the village stream to get water for the entire household.
The task, she explained, was both backbreaking and time-consuming.
Her ordeal increased when she became wife and mother of eight children. Now she had to work all day not only to provide water but also till the soil to put food on the table for her family, leaving her with less time to bond with her children.
“It was difficult as a mother to get enough water for the entire family, if it were to be now, it wouldn’t have been like that,” she said, speaking in her local dialect.
Asked if her husband ever helped out at the stream, she smiled and said no. Local customs put such job beyond men!
At the start of each year, she hoped and prayed the water situation improve, but as years turned into decades, she lost hope and the stream continued to be her last resort.
The stream is popularly known as Iket Esop river and was the community’s only source of water supply for centuries, according to local accounts.
The stream is about 10-kilometre walk to and from the village centre. The road to it is slippery and untarred while rafia palm and chirping birds bid visitors welcome as they approach the mouth of the stream.
The path to the river is hilly and steep with alternating holes as steps, the size of foot, dug at various points to aid movement and prevent accidents .And accidents were frequent. Often the women would slip off the steps. Many water pots and utensils were lost. Of course, injuries resulted, bruises and bone dislocation or fracture. As water was scarce, so medicare was far-fetched.Herbs were used to treat bruises while the local bone setter was the only veritable “physician”. And a woman would recall two family members who were confined to using walking stick early in life after they crashed on the path, till they passed on.
Despite the hard road to the stream, its water is far from being pure; part of its surface is covered with algae.
”We use it to wash clothes, bathe and we have to boil the water before we drink,” Augustine Carlos, a tour guide, said.
“Three communities depend on the stream for their source of water and some individuals come here to offer sacrifice and pray to the goddess of the river. The water doesn’t get dry.”
Carlos said the poor quality of the water had repeatedly led to the outbreak of waterborne diseases in the village and it was in the bid to address it that members of the community in 2009 dug a well which supplies water only in the rainy season and dries up during the harmattan.
Ukeme Etim, a driver, corroborated the story and noted that the dry season was the most difficult period for his family as it was difficult for them to get water.
Twenty three-year-old Edidion Pius, a mother of two, shared the same view.
But respite came the way of the villagers in 2013 when the village was selected for a water project under the Niger Delta support project sponsored by the European Union, UNICEF and the state government.Now modernity has come to the rural community. A proper water facility complete with treatment plant, overhead storage tanks and distributed by quality pipes and taps all over the community. Safe water is here, Ikot Esop is no more the same.
The project saw water taps installed at different areas of Iket Esop, a development that has brought joy and excitement to members of the community.Threat to life via water-borne diseases and accidents on the path to the stream, has been eliminated.
The women sang and danced at the launch of the project, saying they had now turned the page on decades of water scarcity and disease.
They said they now invest quality time in their businesses which in turn has improved their living condition and hygiene. With infectious smiles in the crowd, Harriet said the water project was for her a “childhood dream come true”.