Daniel Dickinson
5 October 2009
Nairobi — Patience has had to live up to her name.
After years of poor or non-existent water supply to her neighbourhood in Chitungwiza town, outside Zimbabwea's capital, Harare, there is finally a reliable borehole that provides her family with clean and safe water.
The 350,000 residents of Chitungwiza know from bitter experience how important clean water is.
The cholera epidemic that swept across Zimbabwe killed over 4,300 people in late 2008 and early 2009.
One hundred and seventy of those lived in Chitungwiza.
'People were afraid to go out and meet their neighbours because they were scared of catching cholera,' Patience said.
She collected water from an unprotected well some distance from her home.
Some of her friends caught cholera from similar contaminated sources and died. Fortunately, her family avoided the bacteria.
The new borehole in Chitungwiza is a two-minute walk from her home. It provides good protection against cholera, which is a water-borne disease.
"This water could have saved many people in Chitungwiza," Patience said.
The nationwide epidemic, the largest ever in Africa, led to over 98,000 infections.
The scale of the outbreak has been put down to the breakdown of the country's water infrastructure, which forced people like Patience to collect untreated and unsafe water from unprotected sources.
A few kilo meters down the road from Chitungwiza is the Price Edward Dam Water Works, a water treatment plant which supplies the town.
Opened in 1973, it was operating at a tiny fraction of its capacity during the epidemic, an unfortunate example of how degraded infrastructure contributed to the spread of cholera.
The plant has since been rehabilitated as part of the $17m the European Commission has spent on cholera prevention and treatment in Zimbabwe over the past two years.
Brightly painted pipes and relentlessly turning pumps are the noticeable results of the investment.
Tadious Maruta is the works superintendent at the plant: "Before, when one of the pumps broke down, we didn't have a replacement. So the water supply was interrupted," he said. 'Since the plant was rehabilitated we are able to repair and replace parts and keep the water flowing to the people of Chitingwiza.'
The political turmoil that has affected Zimbabwe over the past 18 months also played a role in the epidemic.
The widespread resignation of health care staff made coping with the outbreak very challenging.
The European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Karel De Gucht, who visited Price Edward Dam Water Works, said it was necessary to focus both on the treatment of cholera and on its prevention.
"The recent cholera epidemic demonstrated very clearly that you need to make sure the water people are accessing is clean.
"When preventive work is done properly, obviously you have to cure less people."
At the height of the epidemic, there were 470 cholera treatment centres across Zimbabwe, which were supported by the European Commission.
Cholera is endemic in Zimbabwe. It is expected that each year there will be fresh outbreaks, especially during the rainy season in October and November.
It is the scale of the outbreak that international donors working with the government are trying to control.
Back at the borehole at Chitingwiza, there is plenty of water flowing.
Patience and her neighbours are once again visiting each other, confident in the knowledge that now the risks of catching cholera have been reduced.
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