Stories: Bitter water

By Tim Shenk

On hot afternoons, children cool off in a shallow pool that ripples with water piped from a nearby natural spring. As the sun beats down, they splash and chase minnows that dart beneath the surface.

These childhood pleasures, however, are a health hazard in the village of Nahhalin. Hundreds of children here have been stricken with recurring diarrhea, fevers or skin infections.

The 6,600 residents of this struggling farming community near Bethlehem store their sewage in concrete cesspits beneath their houses. The sewage soaks into the ground, seeping into pipes and polluting the spring.

Nahhalin’s situation is not unique. Wastewater treatment is an urgent need in nearly all Palestinian communities. Most have no sewer systems and only one has its own wastewater treatment plant. Municipal sewer systems such as those used in the United States and Canada, are too expensive, especially given the rocky terrain. And much of the land that surrounds Palestinian villages is controlled by Israeli settlements and soldiers, leaving little open space for water catchment pools and sewage treatment plants.

MCC is supporting a Palestinian organization, Applied Research Institute - Jerusalem (ARIJ), in installing specially designed, small-scale wastewater treatment systems in Nahhalin and other Palestinian villages in the West Bank.

Nahhalin’s first wastewater treatment plant, built by ARIJ with funds from MCC, will directly benefit 1,300 residents as well as help prevent contamination of water supplies used by the whole village. Later ARIJ will also install household wastewater treatment units for 180 families in Nahhalin and other Palestinian communities that have similar sanitation problems.

Meanwhile, in Nahhalin, parents are trying to figure out how to keep their children from playing in the spring water.

"I have eight kids in my house," says one mother, Fathiya Shakarna. "Where are they going to go?”

Shakarna recalls when her 12-year-old son Mohamed came home with a dark, itchy rash. She realized he had been infected by playing in the spring, and she ordered him not to go back, but he disobeyed her. Exasperated, she sent him to pick grapes in the family vineyard to keep him out of trouble.

The spring is not the only worry parents have. Health workers say people throughout the village are getting sick from drinking contaminated water. The head of a local clinic, Dr. Naem Khaled Al-Sheikh, estimates that 2,000 people in Nahhalin are infected with a waterborne amoeba that causes diarrhea and sometimes nausea and fever. Many who become ill are children or babies.

At the home of Walid and Zeinab Shakarna, three of the couple's children became violently ill on one morning in May. First, their 17-year-old daughter, Fatima, fell to the floor with a sharp pain in her stomach, and her brothers Ahmad, 15, and Ismail, 22, soon became ill as well. Walid spent the morning rushing his children to the clinic, and they later recovered.

The family believes sewage leaked into the water pipes that supply their neighborhood, because about 10 of their neighbors also got sick that day. Since then, the Shakarnas' neighbors have drunk only expensive bottled water, but the Shakarna family cannot afford it.

"We don't have the money," Walid Shakarna says. "So, our only option is to boil it."

Village leaders say Nahhalin's sewage problem has been getting worse because the community is becoming crowded. The chair of the village council, a soft-spoken architectural engineer named Mohamed Ghayadah, unfurls a large map to show the difficulties facing Nahhalin as its population grows.

Looking back
Forty years ago, Nahhalin had roughly 1,000 people, and it claimed about nine square miles, or 14 kilometers, of pastures, farmland and rocky hills. Its residential area covered about 250 acres, or 100 hectares, which was adequate at the time.

But in 1967, the Israeli military invaded the West Bank and took over much of the land belonging to Nahhalin. Since then, five Israeli settlements have sprung up around the village. To protect more land for settlement expansion, the Israeli military forbids Nahhalin's residents from building houses outside the original 250-acre residential area, even though the village's population is growing rapidly.

Because of these limits, new houses in Nahhalin are only a few steps from existing ones. When it rains, cesspits leak directly into neighboring yards, and Ghayadah is inundated with complaints.

"Neighbors stopped talking to each other because of this problem," he says.

Even when people empty their cesspits properly, using a tanker truck, the situation is not much better. Because of Nahhalin's limited space, the truck drives to a spot at the village edge and dumps the sewage onto the ground.

New options
An MCC-supported wastewater treatment plant should ease these problems.

ARIJ engineers have also spent the last two years developing household wastewater treatment units, measuring five-by-five-feet or 150-by-150 centimeters. Families can use these units to turn sewage into much cleaner "gray water" that can be used to irrigate olive orchards and vineyards.

With support from MCC, ARIJ is planning to construct these wastewater treatment units for 180 households in Nahhalin and other communities in the West Bank that face similar sanitation problems.

Ghayadah has high hopes for Nahhalin if the village can clean up its sewage problem. Like many communities in the West Bank, Nahhalin has ancient ruins – tombs, mosaics and underground chambers – that he believes tourists could someday appreciate.

But because of Nahhalin's limited space, families have built over many of these ruins. In at least six cases, families have used ancient, underground structures as cesspits, Ghayadah says.

Last year, with permission from the owners, Ghayadah led a team of volunteers to clean out one of these ruins. The result is stunning – a large, underground room with circular arches, carved out of solid limestone. Inside are several millstones and other remains of what may have been an ancient olive press.

"I am trying to make it part of the route that tourists take when they come to Bethlehem," Ghayadah says.

More urgently, however, Ghayadah hopes to clean up the village spring to make it safe for children. As a community leader, he will encourage families living near the spring to participate in the wastewater treatment projects. When the spring is clean, he wants the village to build a small park around it with a tiled wading area for children.

"I would like to make pools for the children to play in as they like," he says.

Read a Palestinian farmer’s story.

See photos.