One housing project will help take some people away from dirt and disease, writes Dr Muiris Houston
MWAPE MUBANDA is a 37-year-old woman whose husband died from Aids three years ago. She lives with her six children in a shanty town in Kitwe, a city of 400,000 people in the copper belt of Northern Zambia.
Mwape has lost two other children to diarrhoea and dysentery over the past two years. Lots of children from the compound play in the sewage running openly in front of her shack.
Justina Mwila is a 55-year-old widow. Her husband died of Aids 15 years ago and she herself is HIV positive. She also lives in the mud hut compound of Twatasha, Kitwe along with her son Herson, his wife and her grandchildren.
Welcome to the reality of everyday life in sub-Saharan Africa. The city of Kitwe, 400km north of Zambia's capital Lusaka, is made up of a series of compounds, with 40,000-100,000 people living in each.
There is no running water or proper sanitation in these sprawling shanty towns. Some 70 per cent of people are unlikely to eat on any given day.
Women and children are second-class citizens; married men disappear for months on end pursuing random sexual encounters, a custom that has fuelled the heterosexual spread of Aids.
Lack of proper sanitation exposes children to life-threatening dysentery, with many dying as a result of the severe dehydration that follows diarrhoea and vomiting.
Mike Dolan, a nurse, and Dermot Birch, a building contractor from Clonbur, Co Galway were actively looking for an opportunity to undertake voluntary work in Africa. Inspired by the Niall Mellon project and a desire to "give something back", a discussion with Fr Padraic Kelly, SMA, a native of the nearby village of Cornamona, led to an invitation to Zambia, where they met Fr Anthony Kelly, the regional superior of the SMA order.
He had identified housing, sanitation and clean water as crucial to breaking the cycle of disease and death in the Kitwe region. Dolan and Birch agreed to start a large-scale housing project under Fr Anthony's direction.
Rather than adopt a building blitz approach using hundreds of Irish volunteers, they decided that a key element would be to empower local people by getting them to build the houses.
Ownership was reinforced by asking a committee of local people to decide who would occupy each house as it became available. "They select who goes in first so the locals have a sense of ownership," Dolan said.
Each house costs €6,000 and takes three to four weeks to build. Materials are sourced locally; building is done during the dry season, starting in March and April.
In the rainy season, building blocks made of mud and cement are stockpiled.
Fr Billy Reilly and the people of Cornamona and Clonbur in Co Galway along with Fr Colm Kilcoyne and his parishioners from Cong, Co Mayo, support the project financially.
"We have helped with building skills, such as how to mark out sites. But they [ the Zambians] teach us also," Birch said in reference to a new method of damp-coursing he has learned in Kitwe.
Last April, Dolan and Birch went out to Zambia with seven other volunteers. A typical day saw them building from 7.30am to 5.30pm alongside the local community.
They visited hospices and orphanages, as well as accompanying local health workers in the compounds.
"There is access to retroviral therapy for Aids patients, which helps to prolong life," Dolan said, although the first port of call for those who were sick was still the witch-doctor. In an extreme form of complementary therapy, Zambians happily combine western medicine with voodoo cures.
However, the practice of cutting off Kaposi's sarcomas (a malignant tumour found in Aids patients) with dirty and un-sterilised implements, condemns some victims to an early death.
Fr Anthony Kelly has coined the term "sweat equity" to reflect the way the building project is structured. Tenants are asked to pay a nominal rent in the form of a bag of cement per month, while other families "pay" by looking after Aids orphans in their homes.
With 10 houses already completed, the first phase of 32 units is well on its way. Each has a toilet and is plumbed for running water. While toilets are currently manually flushed into a septic tank with buckets of water, a well will be bored to pipe water into the new homes.
Mwape is waiting for her home to be completed by the Zambia Housing project. "I can't wait for my family to move away from dirt and disease," she says. "My greatest fear is that more of my children will die as a result of dysentery."
• For more information or to make a donation to the project visit www.zambiahousingproject.comor phone either 087 2210152 or 087 6500176