Kabinjari Primary School

“As the Senior Teacher, it’s really hard to see how children suffer in this school,” said Madam Linet Sagire of Kabinjari Primary School.

“Their performance is bad. This is because they waste a lot of time going to fetch water outside the school. Other teachers with the same position as mine really undermine me when we meet. They laugh at the school I am in, saying how I hold a big position and yet the school is poor.”

The 431 pupils and 15 teachers and staff that makeup Kabinjari Primary School are tired. Tired of walking to get water, tired of getting hurt along the way, and tired of the energy and money they are losing in treating the waterborne diseases that they contract from the water they drink.

Students here must leave school every day to fetch water. They head to a spring in the village, as well as open water sources that include a stagnant trench of muddy water and a small creek, to fetch water for all of their school’s drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. The path is steep, muddy, and often narrow, including a handmade wooden plank bridge over a stream. When it rains, much of the path becomes a slippery stream. Injuries in the name of fetching water are not uncommon. It then becomes an insult to literal injury when the students also get sick from the water they worked so hard to collect.

“They are physically drained,” said Field Officer Laura Alulu in her field notes after one of her first visits to the school.

“Looking at the terrain of the place, the children have to go down the slope then climb up while carrying water. This drains them physically. Another negative consequence is how the children struggle for water; they end up fighting each other. Also, when it rains, the place becomes slippery, they fall down and get hurt, and the small bridge they use to cross is also risky for young children.”

The spring the students go to has not been maintained well over the years, bringing the quality of the water into question. When students get fed up waiting for their turn to fill their container, the fights break out even though there is really nothing they can do to change the speed of this daily task. The alternative water source – the muddy trench – is faster yet so much worse in quality. Because the water is combined for use back at school, even one container of poor quality water means everyone suffers. Yet every day, the students fetch water from both sources to make it back in time for at least some lessons.

“The current water situation here affects me in a way that I cannot perform my duties well,” said Deputy Head Teacher Hadley Shimeka.

“As the Deputy, I am in charge of discipline, so it becomes very hard to solve cases when children get involved in fights when they go to fetch water. Some parents come complaining and this becomes hard to solve such cases. This affects me because I don’t feel like I have done my work to perfection.”