How Does She: Bring clean water to the slums of Bangladesh while raising two young children in the richest country on earth?

 

Marla’s ‘family’ in Bangladesh

 

Twenty hours after leaving home, Marla Smith-Nilson and her colleagues pull into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the night.    With morning they’ll begin the two hour drive, grateful that a recent paving project has reduced its time from the six hours it used to take.  They’re headed to Bishikiltu, a 12-village district in Ethiopia that now has clean drinking water and household toilets, thanks to Marla and Water 1^st International, the organization she started in her basement four years ago. 

 

She’ll be welcomed by hundreds of villagers in the next week, treated like royalty, really.  She will visit several homes, small thatched roof dwellings that shelter adults, children and farm animals each night, whose walls and ceilings are black with the stain of innumerable cook fires.  At most there might be a chair inside and if there is, it will be cleared off and offered to Marla, “as if I were Oprah Winfrey.”

 

Marla is here on her annual visit, to make sure that the spring cap, storage tank, pipes and water points installed with funds she raised are providing clean water to all the villages, that those responsible for regular maintenance of the system have been doing their job, and that dues to pay for the system have been collected and accounted for.  In the span of a few months – the ones the rest of us will spend preparing for and celebrating the winter holidays – Marla will leave her family for weeks at a time to make similar trips to Bangladesh, Honduras, and India to make sure the investments made by Water 1^st are improving the lives there of women and their families.

 

The physical water system is only part of her work.  She’ll interview the villagers to make sure they are also learning basic hygiene techniques, such as hand washing and using the toilet (teaching them to keep the animals and their dung out of human living quarters is part of the advanced lesson).

 

Such personal information is not disclosed without the requisite period of relaxation, conversation, and often, the traditional coffee ceremony.  Marla will sit patiently on the occasional wooden chair but more frequently, clay slab bed, dispensing social niceties with the help of one or more translators before getting down to business.

 

On a recent visit, business included conducting a survey to learn how the recent availability of clean water has changed the lives of women there.  These women previously spent hours of every day, hiking to and from an often polluted water source, carrying up to six gallons, weighing about 50 pounds, with each trip.  (Author’s note here – I feel buff when I press a couple sets at 50 pounds while lying on my back.  These women, half my size, lift that weight and walk in plastic shoes over rough terrain for two to three miles.  Sort of puts things in perspective).

 

About 90% of these women are illiterate, so Marla conducts her interviews with the help of pictures – in this case, photos of villagers doing ten different activities, ranging from collecting water to plowing, cooking and preparing coffee.  Most of these women point to 9 or 10 of the pictures representing tasks they did the day previously.  Marla was not surprised that their husbands pointed to only three or four pictures, one of which, not in the women’s selection by the way, was social time, relaxation.

 

“The lives of these women are so vastly different from mine, but I can relate to this feeling of trying to keep all the balls in the air.”

 

Marla with her family in Seattle

 

But here’s the thing, if Marla were to list ten things she did in one day, how many of us could claim the same things? 

 

Like sharing a coffee ceremony in a thatched hut with Ethiopian women?  Or being showered with flowers upon entering the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh?

 

There are other things on Marla’s list of activities that might be found on ours.  Picking the kids up from after-school care at the end of a day at the office, for instance.  Or unpacking boxes from when her family moved out of their Ballard home to turn it over to the remodelers for six months.

   

I asked Marla how she managed her life, as a sort of Janus, with one face pointing to play dates, kitchen finishes and school fundraisers while the other looked to the poorest of the poor, the ones who daily go without the most basic of needs.  The ones she holds in her heart as she sits in front of her office computer.

 

“I find myself judging people in the States.  I want to tell them, ‘You don’t appreciate what you have here’.  It can be hard getting people to be involved with people half a world away, whose situations are so hard simply because of where they were born.”

 

But she’s making great progress bringing the story here, even if it isn’t fast enough for her liking.  I was one of 700 people at the Convention Center recently to support Water 1^st, where together we raised half a million dollars to continue Marla’s work.  I saw then and urge you now to take a moment to see Marla and her organization at work.  You will be profoundly moved.

 

http://water1st.org/events/GWGL_2009_film.html

 

You’ll see in the video an Ethiopian woman who tells how she strapped her ill son to her back and walked four hours to the closest doctor.  The boy’s severe diarrhea, brought on by drinking tainted water, kept him in the hospital for five days.  His family had to sell their only livelihood, a donkey, to pay the medical bill.  And how, against every advice she had received about what to do when faced with such a story, Marla emptied her pockets of every bit of money she had – almost $50 – which for this family was more money than they would see in a year, and handed it over. 

 

Back in the states she feels this same challenge in a different way “how much is enough?  I want to understand:  what is my fair share?  I wish I knew, and there probably isn’t really an answer.  But I do feel that now that I have recognized my position in this world as a person, who by the sheer luck of my birth, has access to wealth and opportunity, I must show compassion –I must embrace my responsibility to do something about the gross inequities that exist.”

 

Marla is one of those people, I often think they are the blessed or the chosen, who have an experience in their youth that sets their course for a lifetime.  For Marla it was in middle school during a family vacation.  From the small Arizona town where they lived, her family drove a short distance across the border to vacation at a lake in Mexico.  While they spent their days boating, fishing and swimming on the lake, Marla noticed a girl about her age, coming each day to this same lake to collect water presumably to supply her family.   What was Marla’s recreation was this girl’s life.  And the arbitrary line, the US border, that separated their homes, set the path for two people to have vastly different lives.  She saw the injustice, but at the same time, she saw the possibility of solution. 

 

 

She went to the University of Arizona to earn a degree in civil engineering, figuring that the way to solve the problem of clean water was construction.  But during her travels around the globe she saw that the building of pumps and reservoirs was only half the challenge.  Other such projects were often found in ruin, ravaged for parts, dysfunctional shortly after being installed.  The key, she learned, was to build a community of investors, small dues payers who communally took responsibility for the operation and maintenance of any system that was installed.  And provide the education to go with it.

 

Marla is replicating that lesson in her work back in Seattle.  Educating us about the need and providing us the means to help address it.

 

Visit Water First at http://www.water1st.org/ or follow the trip Marla is taking to Bangladesh and India right now on Facebook and learn how you can support their work, whether with a cash contribution, purchase of a holiday gift, or drinking beer at their annual fundraiser “Water 1^st, Beer 2^nd”.

 

Marla’s (not so) secrets for how she does it:

• she’s another fan of internet and cell phone connections, though when she travels to remote corners of the world it’s hard to get either.  It’s usually too expensive to actually call, but when she gets back to her hotel room, she immediately checks to see if there is a message from her family.  No call is the signal that everything is fine.
• Marla realizes her ability to leave places an extra burden on her husband Jim to manage his job and their two kids for weeks at a time.  Looking at the two of them, it’s obvious they are in this work together.

What book has Marla read recently?

• The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, by Rose George

From Publisher’s Weekly: “With irreverence and pungent detail, George breaks the embarrassed silence over the economic, political, social and environmental problems of human waste disposal.”  In short, the perfect holiday gift!

 

Whom does Marla want me to interview next?

• Her mind immediately moved to the amazing women she has met who are working in their home villages, but she’s giving thought to others who don’t require a malaria vaccine to visit.

Comments

[Shelly Yapp]

Women's work makes the world go round -- for real. Shout it out; shout it proud! Bravo for getting these life stories on the air.

[Carolyn]

Outstanding! I'm really enjoying your blog! Keep up the great work Janet. Thanks for including me!

Carolyn

[Judy Tobin]

thank heavens for the Marlas of this world -- definitely counter balances, if only for a moment, this morning's headlines. Great story, Janet -- the best of all Christmas cards!

[Roz Bornstein]

How inspiring!! I always look forward to finding out what book each narrator has read.