Escherichia and Alappuzha

We have been plodding along with various tasks the past couple days, continuing our consultations with local experts, monitoring the prototype build, and testing water samples at MGU. It’s a little hard to believe our time here is over half over; there is still far too much to do as schedules fall by the wayside.

Sunday was spent here at the university, preparing the first round of Escherichia coliform (e. coli) tests, making arrangements for the next few days, and planning for the long term. Although there have been some delays with the prototype construction (as is expected when trying something new) we hope to see it completed next week.

We took a day trip to the nearby city of Alappuzha on Monday for a couple of meetings. Our first stop was at the medical hospital to meet with Dr. Padmakumar, an expert on monsoon and water-related diseases. Meeting in his office on the third floor of a towering hospital complex (we got plenty of stares walking through the wards), he outlined some of the environmental and social factors contributing to health problems in Kuttanad. There are a wide range of independent contributors to disease aside from basic surface water pollution (from agriculture, houseboat tourism, sewage/waste). Although Kerala has been much-heralded as a model for low-cost, community-driven health care, Dr. Padmakumar was cautionary about the current state of regional care. He said education is less pervasive than it once was, and people are not as focused on preventative care, instead resorting to emergency visits (a well-publicized failure in the American system as well). Among water-borne diseases, Hepatitis A and E, Weils disease (lactospirosis), typhoid, cholera, and amoebiosis are endemic in Kuttanad. His hospital is a “tertiary” center, one of a handful of top-tier hospitals in the state responsible for emergency care and complicated cases referred from primary health centers and district hospitals. While rainwater cannot solve all the problems with dirty and mismanaged water sources in the region, he said it is a definite improvement for individual and small-scale access.

We then visited Ms. Sudha Soni, a prominent social activist who was one of Christina’s original contacts for her research in Kerala. We updated her on our project work and discussed some of her recent activities. She has been involved in a number of community-driven environmental- and water-related projects, and had some valuable advice about management of a shared water system. Her current project is the development of a household-level sustainable foods initiative, encouraging families to grow their own produce for nutritional benefits and energy savings. It faces many of the same social entrepreneurship obstacles we are dealing with, in particular encouraging people to take up a high level of responsibility and administration of a system they are unfamiliar with.

On our way back from the city we stopped by Kainkary village, hoping to diversify our perspective beyond Achinakom. As evinced by Christina’s water testing last year, this area of southern Kuttanad has significantly worse health problems than the north, and it showed. It is downstream of a couple major rivers which bring waste and pollution from the highlands of Kerala to the ocean. Although the families we talked to were aware of the importance of boiling drinking water, they admitted not being entirely thorough in the process and oftentimes drew water from the adjacent canal (others used nearby wells or cleaner, albeit distant, rivers). There was evidence of a onetime-extant municipal water supply line in some areas, but they reported all nearby taps were rarely supplied. As has been the case throughout, once we (Sylas) introduced ourselves, everyone was very outgoing and friendly. This ease of access is extremely important in order to build connections in other villages for purposes of project expansion.

Our coliform test results were unfortunately unsurprising, all sources measuring over 1100 (max. count per liter water). We will have to repeat the experiments with diluted samples to establish upper bounds for the counts. While boiling for a couple minutes will kill all these organisms, it is a bit jarring to see such results from people’s (inclusive of us, on occasion) drinking water. They also might be indications of other, more impervious, contaminates.

We visited Achinakom Tuesday morning to see the progress of the latest water-elimination plan. To reduce (eliminate!) the water permeating the prototype walls, preventing the foundational concrete from setting, they plan to segment off and pump out the two adjacent canals. This seems slightly over the line to overkill, but we are assured it is “no problem,” and the cost is nominal. In the meantime, the continuing layers of concrete being applied to the walls have entirely failed to harden in place and stop the leakage, so it is clear something must be done.

Back at the SES, we attended a “Fresher” (first-year Masters students) welcoming event. It started off with introductions as awkward as would be expected from such a thing, ranging from pure terror (some of the women) to over compensatory bravado (some of the guys). We got a brief shoutout from Dr. Thomas’ introduction (he and Dr. Ramasamy attend all departmental functions), which was just about the last English we heard for the following two hours. (Here follows speculation on the content of Malayalam heard:) It was at the very least reassuring (heartening?) to see the older students having so much fun calling up questions and mild insults (?) at the assembled newcomers, a reminder that the social order, at least among youth, is much the same across the world.