Every day, along the road I live on in Harare, there are groups of people waiting outside houses that have bore holes. They wait, sitting and standing, next to different shapes and sizes of containers. They wait for water. People carry the containers of water on their heads. They roll drums of water down the road. They use shopping trolley’s from the nearby TM Supermarket to push the water home.
In Greendale we haven’t had a consistent supply of municipal water for over two years.
I drove past a sign on Enterprise Road recently. It caught my eye because in big red letters the word BEWARE jumped out at me. The sign advised that most bore hole water in Harare, and the rest of Zimbabwe, isn’t as clean as we need it to be.
So while reading the December issue of The New York Times Magazine recently, a story on a man called Ron Rivera, by writer Sara Corbett, caught my eye. His story is about getting clean water to people.
Have a read.
Early on, Ron Rivera was a left-leaning, power-to-the-people sort of young man, full of vague ideas about social justice and eradicating poverty. Fresh out of college in Puerto Rico, he joined the Peace Corps and spent six years moving between the poorest parts of Ecuador and Panama, engaged in noble but sometimes futile-seeming community-development work. But then, during a stay in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1972, he met an older male potter who took him in as an apprentice. And as if by magic, the vagueness and futility dissipated, replaced by possibility. Why? Because Ron Rivera was now a left-leaning, power-to-the-people potter.
Pottery became Rivera’s way of laying his hands on the world’s problems. He moved to Nicaragua during the Contra war and worked to start a program to help injured veterans make ceramic insulators for electrical lines. He later joined the staff of a small organization called Potters for Peace, seeking out indigenous potters across Latin America and helping them refine the way they mixed glazes and built kilns in order to increase their profits and therefore their power.
Working with rural women who made clay piggy banks and sold them to exploitative middle-men, Rivera encouraged them to create something similar but new-ceramic armadillos, say – and then triple the price. When the middlemen grew indignant, demanding to know why this nearly identical type of ware cost more, he counseled the women to respond with a whiff of their own indignation, “Because it is an armadillo and not a pig.”
Then one day in October 1998, Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, flooding roads and triggering mudslides, killing an estimated 11,000 people. At home in Managua, knowing how readily bacterial disease follows on the heels of disaster, Rivera remembered an object he encountered years earlier in Ecuador, a simple terra cotta pot that looked like the sort of thing in which the rest of us-the earth’s less vulnerable-might plant our springtime geraniums. Made of clay mixed with some grist-usually sawdust or ground rice husk that would burn off later in the kiln-and then shaped carefully, this pot had thousands of micropores. And those pores, along with a coating of antibacterial silver solution, allowed it to perform a small but significant miracle: removing 98 to 100 percent of the bacteria from contaminated water, making it safe to drink.
Convinced that he could help indigenous potters mass-produce clay-pot water filters for their own communities if the process for making them could be standardized, Rivera began to experiment, calculating the optimal size and clay composition. He then designed a mold for the filter and a special clay press that was operated with a tire jack, which he figured was one of earth’s more universally available bits of technology. Rather than applying for a patent, Rivera posted his work, in painstaking detail, on the Internet. The filter, which costs roughly $15 to make, rests inside a lidded five-gallon plastic bucket with a spigot. It purifies enough daily water for a family of six.
Collaborating with health organizations and relief groups, Rivera helped native potters build filter factories in Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador. He did it in Kenya, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Darfur. He often traveled in the wake of water-related disasters-following floods in Ghana or a Tsunami Sri Lanka-capitalizing on the rush of aid money to establish a locally owned enterprise that would sustain itself long after he left.
According to the United Nations, more than five million people die each year from diseases related to unclean drinking water. Most live in developing countries and, overwhelmingly, they are children under the age of 5. Rivera liked to say that he wouldn’t rest until he “put a dent” in the problem, which by his calculation meant setting up 100 water-filter factories, creating enough pottery to provide safe water to at least four million people. His friends nicknamed him “Ron Rapido” for his velocity and vigor and for the impatient way he suffered through meetings.
In August, standing in a village in rural Nigeria, having just finished his 30th filter factory, Rivera expressed a larger impatience. “How is it”, he mused to an engineering student with whom he was traveling, “that scientists can work so hard on improving TVs and cell phones when so many people don’t even have clean water to drink?”
He didn’t yet know that a mosquito, presumably bred in a nearby swamp, would infect him with a particularly virulent form of malaria, nor that he would die-back in Managua, his wife at his side-only two weeks later. But surely he knew by then that solutions, like problems, are capable of crossing borders, of pollinating like seeds on the wind. Since his death, Rivera’s protégés at Potters for Peace have fanned out to continue the work. There are filter factories planned for Bolivia, Rwanda, Somaliland and Mozambique-a global legion of local potters, as Rivera would have it, poised to lay their hands on the problem.
Ron Rivera born 1948, died 2008
