Archive for the ‘General news’ Category
Spotlight on our work – Kumudimoolai, India
450 more people now with ecosan, thanks to support from the ACT Foundation Thanks to support from the ACT Foundation, the people of Kumudimmolai now have 90 more ecosan, clean water and livelihoods. Tamil Nadu in the south of India is considered to be one of the wealthiest states in the country, but behind the statistics of economic growth and development lies another story – one of acute poverty. The rural population of Tamil Nadu ranks among the poorest in the world, with an estimated 12 million people living on or below the poverty line. Kumudimoolai is a rural village in Tamil Nadu, 30 miles south of the bustling city of Cuddalore. The 1,973 people living here belong to one the poorest and most excluded social groups in India, and when we first visited the community, poverty was rife. There were no working toilets in the village, which meant people were forced to find somewhere to go out in the open, which was spreading illness and disease. On top of this, the area is prone to flooding, and is always water logged. Human waste and in-organic fertilisers had contaminated the ground and water supply, making it hazardous to drink. Maintaining work was also ...
Stories from the field – a daily reality
On a visit to a rural Indian village, Jane Bond contemplates the daily reality of living without a toilet I spend a day with one of our field staff, Arumugam to help me better understand our project work and life in rural Tamil Nadu. He takes me to some villages we are planning on working in as soon as we have funds. I know the facts - 7 million+ rural households here in Tamil Nadu don’t have access to toilets – 76% of the rural population. Water quality is worsening, largely due to human fecal waste in drinking water; 91% of water tested in one study was contaminated. Over the last five years incidences of acute diarrheal diseases have increased from about 116,000/year to 523,000/year. Today I’m going to be meeting just a few of the people who live with these conditions on a daily basis. We go to a village called Boothampedi; the road doesn’t reach the village so we walk along a small dyke; on either side goats and young cows are gazing in recently harvested paddy fields. It’s very hot and it's quiet in the midday heat. The houses are small ...
Stories from the field – organic compost
In her third story, Jane Bond finds out more about our organic compost One of the fundamental benefits of Wherever the Needs approach to Sanitation and water is our compost toilets which mean that human waste is safely and effectively recycled. Human waste is very hazardous to health and can easily enter the water system if not properly managed. Here in India only 30% of the country has a sewage system and much of that is leaking or incomplete, common opinion being that around 20% of the system is approaching effective; mostly waste is dumped into water systems or into pits which often leak, leaching waste through the soil. Each person’s faecal waste is about 127kg/per year; every gram contains: 10 million pathogens, 1 million protozoa, 100,000 helminths (intestinal worms) and 10,000 worms and viruses. It makes my stomach turn and I feel pretty nauseous when I think of India’s 1.2 billion people and the incredibly huge amount of human waste they generate annually, most of it slowly creeping into the water system. So, David (Wherever the Need CEO) and Paramasivan (head of our Indian office) take me to ...
Stories from the field – Rice
In the second of her stories from the field, Jane Bond gets to know India and discovers the world of rice... I’m adjusting to rural India and as we travel out to look at projects I am fascinated. Main roads are filled with cows, buses, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians sharing the same space – pavements don’t exist and traffic lights are often ignored. The river of humanity is chaotic and noisy, everyone honks musical horns, fails to use indicators and drives where they like. Only cows placidly move along, serene in the knowledge they are the rulers of the road! Roads become smaller, emptier and windier deeper into the rural areas. Its harvest time, paddy fields are being hand scythed by groups of people, haystacks are common, we slow down for herds of bullocks and goats walking along the roads and grain are being spread across the road. This is for threshing rice; as vehicles drive over the rice the outer husk is separated from the grain. I think this is an ingenious labour saving solution. We stop to see the rice grown on Wherever the Need's research ...
Stories from the field – living with dirty water
Jane Bond is volunteer Project Officer for Wherever the Need India. She has been living and volunteering in India since November 2011, based in Tamil Nadu since February 2013. Read her stories from the field... Yesterday it rained heavily and unexpectedly in Tamil Nadu. For some areas it was the first rain in over a year, so I’m going to talk about the realities of living with India’s water supply. You’d think the rain would be a good thing, but it came at the wrong time and many farmers had seedlings damaged. Water here is a health risk we are lucky enough not to be familiar with in the west. When I first came to live in India water became a mild obsession as I adjusted – every drop I needed had to be pumped and was available only at certain times. For cooking and drinking my water had to be filtered and sometimes boiled - all of this took a lot of planning and time. At the time I lived in Calcutta which has terrible sanitation and water issues. Despite my care I was sick with water related illness regularly – sometimes as often as once a month. I ...
Emergency Cyclone Appeal
India Cyclone - Emergency Appeal You may have heard on the news about the cyclone that recently devastated south-east India. Tamil Nadu, the region in which many of Wherever the Need's projects are based, has been badly hit - the cyclone has devastated the lives of the people and communities with whom we work so closely. Infrastructure, services and facilities are severely impaired and damaged; towns and villages are without electricity and clean water; many people have been left homeless. Water supplies are polluted and there is a genuine concern that there will be an outbreak of diseases such as diarrhoea or cholera We want to use our expertise and knowledge of the region to get sanitation and water facilities to where they are most needed and we need your help. Please donate now. Please donate... Yes No Would you like to receive our occasional newsletter?
Summer Newsletter 2011
Read our Summer Newsletter for a run-down on our recent work in India.Click the newsletter to enlarge Read the full newsletter here (PDF 1.4mb)
Sixteen women
This is our latest video, share amongst friends & family. We welcome any feedback!
A Christmas success
A huge thank you to everyone who contributed towards our Christmas Appeal, which aimed to raise £7,300 to feed 200 street children in Bangalore for a year. Thanks to your generosity we have raised over £10,000 for this cause! The extra £2,700 raised beyond our target will be used to provide school equipment and books for the children, which will greatly enhance their education and future prospects. We are currently discussing with an organisation in India the possibility of them matching all the money we have raised; this would improve the childrens' lives more than we had hoped for. Watch this space for updates in the coming months... To find out more about our Christmas Appeal, visit this page: www.wherevertheneed.org.uk/donate/christmas-appeal-2010
Human excreta may help secure future food security
"Human excreta could have a key role in securing future food security, helping prevent a sharp drop in yields of crops such as wheat due to a shortage of phosphorus inputs, a UK organic body said on Monday. "It is estimated that only 10 percent of the three million tonnes of phosphorus excreted by the global human population each year are returned to agricultural soils," Britain's largest organic certification body, the Soil Association, said. An adequate supply of phosphorous is essential for seed formation, root development and maturing of crops. The supply of phosphorus from mined phosphate rock could peak as soon as 2033 after which it will become increasingly scarce and expensive, the report said. "We are completely unprepared to deal with the shortage of phosphorus inputs, the drop in production and the hike in food prices that will follow," the Soil Association said. Historically in Europe, phosphorus was returned to agricultural land through the application of animal manure and human excreta but from the mid nineteenth century it was replaced by phosphate mined in distant places. Heavy Metals The report called for a change in European Union regulations to permit the use of treated sewage sludge, known as biosolids, on organic certified land, subject to ...
Other news...
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Spotlight on our work – Kumudimoolai, India
450 more people now with ecosan, thanks to support from the ACT Foundation Thanks to support from the ACT Foundation, the people of Kumudimmolai now have 90 more ecosan, clean water ...
-
Stories from the field – a daily reality
On a visit to a rural Indian village, Jane Bond contemplates the daily reality of living without a toilet I spend a day with one of our field staff, Arumugam to ...
-
Stories from the field – organic compost
In her third story, Jane Bond finds out more about our organic compost One of the fundamental benefits of Wherever the Needs approach to Sanitation and water is our compost toilets ...
-
Stories from the field – Rice
In the second of her stories from the field, Jane Bond gets to know India and discovers the world of rice... I’m adjusting to rural India and as we travel out ...
-
Stories from the field – living with dirty water
Jane Bond is volunteer Project Officer for Wherever the Need India. She has been living and volunteering in India since November 2011, based in Tamil Nadu since February ...
