As I stumble down the steep ravine, clods of mud stick to my shoes and I have to try (quite unsuccessfully) to clutch the tall grasses on the makeshift path to get my balance, trying not to look down…
The path is treacherous, cut into the side of a river bank, and every step makes me more aware that I do not like heights. At all. By the time I reach the bottom, I have nearly fallen three times. I am relieved, flustered and more than a little humbled.
I’m doing this walk, from a rural health centre in central Malawi down to a river a few hundred metres below, with Elizabeth, a local mother of four who, unbelievably, did this very same journey just after she’d given birth.
Not in walking shoes or bottle of water in hand, but exhausted and alone. Sore and bleeding. All while carrying all of the pain and shock that can follow labour.
Why? Because until four years ago, this river was the only source of water the health centre and surrounding community had. It meant thirsty new mums having nothing clean to drink. It meant medical equipment could not be cleaned properly. It meant healthcare workers trying to do their jobs without the most basic conditions for hygiene. It meant mothers washing their bodies in river water because there is nowhere else. It meant danger at the very moment life begins.
As we stumble, Elizabeth explains to me that there was little choice but to brave the ravine when she was having her babies.
Sometimes local farmers would shout at the new mothers for washing in the river, concerned about their crops. Already drained by a long labour, the new mums would then struggle to get back up the hill. Elizabeth tells me some would slip and fall into the ditches en route – and wouldn’t be found until the next mother made the exhausting journey down to wash herself.
One woman, Loveness, tells me that after giving birth she was so thirsty that the only way to get water was to collect rainwater from the roof in a cup. Just picture that for a moment. A mother who has just delivered a baby, lying there thirsty, relief dependent on whether it happens to be raining.
I am in Malawi with WaterAid, visiting the Kangolwa Health Centre. Today, thankfully, there is clean water here – and the difference this simple thing has made to the lives of staff and patients here is beyond compare.
With support from the Wimbledon Foundation, WaterAid has installed toilets, showers, and running water for the maternity waiting shelter. Lives have immeasurably changed for the better. By the simple human right of access to clean water.
Back on steady ground at the clinic, I meet Blessings, a midwife who has worked there for years and who remembers what things were like before water came. He speaks about infections in mothers and babies, about the fear that unclean conditions were contributing to sepsis, about hearing that babies had gone home and died weeks later. These are not abstract failures. They are the kinds of tragedies that lodge themselves in a community who became fearful to even visit the centre.
Now, he says, those infections are less of a risk and the local community proactively come to the centre, knowing they are now safe. That change did not come through some miracle of complexity. It came through something both utterly ordinary and simultaneously, deeply transformational: clean water, decent toilets, and good hygiene.
That is what stays with me. How often we talk about water as if it is a background detail. A utility. A given. Turn on the tap, fill the kettle, rinse the plates, water the plants. We hardly even think about it – and as a chef, I constantly take it for granted.
But spend time somewhere that has been denied that certainty and you view water in a completely different way. Water is not a given as it is should be. Water is the beginning.
It is the beginning of health. The beginning of dignity. The beginning of safety. And, in a way that I felt everywhere I went, it is also the beginning of possibility.
At Kangolwa, the Wimbledon Foundation’s funding helped WaterAid work together with local people to bring clean water and sanitation to the health centre and surrounding community. The result is not flashy, but the significance of a tap and a toilet cannot be underestimated. For a woman arriving in labour, being able to wash, drink, use a toilet, and give birth in cleaner conditions is not small. It is enormous. It is the difference between neglect and care. Between fear and relief. Between being told, in effect, that your life can be risked, and being shown that it matters.
Globally, far too many women still give birth without clean water, decent sanitation or hygiene. We should be outraged by that. Not momentarily saddened, not politely concerned – outraged. Because the solutions are not fantastical; we know exactly what they are. They are simple, practical, achievable things that the rest of us stopped noticing precisely because we have them.
As I make my way back up that ravine, slipping and scrambling and trying to keep my dignity intact, I keep thinking about how easily water can be mistaken for something ordinary. It is ordinary, until it is absent. Then it becomes everything.
That is what the incredible women I have met in Malawi have brought home to me. Water is life, yes – but it is also time, strength, health, safety, freedom. It is what allows care to be caring. It is what allows hope to take shape in the real world.
And when clean water arrives in a place that has gone without it, it feels like someone turning the lights on. Everything starts with water.
To sign the WaterAid Time to Deliver petition please click here
Andi Oliver is an award-winning TV chef and broadcaster
This documentary has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
