Bringing the gift of life

"Maszi ndi moyo," Charles Banda likes to say in Chichewa, the language of Malawi.

"Water is life."

Since 1995, when this self-styled water man gave up a good job as a firefighter at the Lilongwe Airport to form the not-for-profit Freshwater Project of Malawi, Banda and his crews have drilled more than 850 wells around rural villages.

They've also constructed hundreds of pit latrines at schools where no sanitation existed before. Adolescent girls often dropped out of school because they were too self-conscious to urinate and defecate without privacy.

These simple sanitary measures have prevented water-borne diseases in untold thousands of impoverished villagers in one of the smallest and poorest countries in Africa. It's also helped increase school attendance in preteen girls.

The Malawi water man struggles against the grim tide of 6,000 poor people, mainly children, who die each day around the world due to a lack of safe drinking water and basic sanitation, according to the World Health Organization.

Banda visited the Capital Region recently to discuss his water project and to attend free screenings of a documentary, "Water First," by Amy Hart of East Greenbush, an independent filmmaker whose day job is video director and producer at the University at Albany's School of Public Health.

Working on a shoestring budget of her own savings and small private donations, Hart has made two trips to Malawi, in 2004 and 2006, and shot 90 hours of film on Banda's efforts.

"Charles has so much energy, charisma and integrity," she said. "He's totally dedicated to this work."

His motto: "One village. One bore-hole."

He has his work cut out for him. More than half of Malawi's 12 million people do not have clean drinking water nearby and two-thirds do not have access to sanitation.

Typically, villagers dip buckets into ponds and rivers, which are often contaminated because not even outhouses exist.

Gathering water for cooking, washing and drinking is the job of girls and women -- who carry heavy buckets on their heads, often 2 miles or more in the predawn hours, from a water source to their huts.

Banda's mission is about more than stainless steel wells and brick latrines.

"We mobilize the villagers to help us build, we make them responsible for its upkeep and we educate them about sanitation," said Banda, a small, wiry 51-year-old with a wife, six children and social work diploma.

An itinerant preacher, Banda began his quest after arriving at a village to deliver a sermon he never gave because children were being carried away on stretchers, stricken with cholera from drinking tainted water.

Banda's project is funded primarily through Water for People, a not-for-profit based in Denver, where he began his U.S. visit.

In Malawi, Banda has a 90 percent success rate drilling the low-tech wells 100-150 feet deep and tapping into aquifers. The water is tested to make sure it's safe for drinking. Each hand-pumped well can serve about 50 families.