Clean Water and a Fresh Start

Mercy Corps is helping rural villages reduce waterborne illnesses by installing new wells. Photo: Tom Ewert/Mercy Corps

Sinoe County, Liberia — Despite three years of peace in this tiny West African nation, the majority of Liberians still drink dirty water. Nearly 7 out of every 10 Liberians must rely on untreated wells, rivers, ponds, creeks and swamps to slake their thirst, according to a joint United Nations and Liberian government survey released in January.

The lack of safe drinking-water sources is especially acute in Sinoe County, where Mercy Corps recently finished building 12 new wells at a cost of about $2,200 each. A social worker here recently told the UN news agency that during dry season "people walk for more than 30 minutes to an hour from one town to another just to find drinking water." Those who drink dirty creek water risk contracting diarrhea, cholera or worse.

Our work to install new drinking-water sources, part of a larger World Bank-funded Mercy Corps project, sets the stage for Liberia's growth by promoting basic infrastructure and job creation. But as I learned on a recent site visit, it's also contributing to the crucial task of national reconciliation, albeit sometimes accidentally.

From education programs to technical support to radio stations to agricultural trainings, Mercy Corps has been assisting Liberians in their quest for a brighter future long before the country's 14-year civil war ended in 2003. In this particular project, Mercy Corps has built 15 box culverts, which divert streams under roads to reduce erosion, and 25 wells. Each well provides safe drinking water for about 500 people.

Most of the labor used to build these wells is provided by youth affected by the war. During the 1990-2003 conflict, perhaps 85 percent of Liberia's youth either participated as combatants or fled their homes to avoid becoming either victims or forced contributors to various militias. With the war over, these youth still face overwhelming odds to build a normal life for themselves and their families.

Last weekend, I met some of these youth in a village called Blaoh. Several staff members and I drove there from Greenville, the capital of Sinoe County, on a one-lane dirt track that slices through Liberia's heavily forested countryside. Blaoh's 50 or so families live in typical rural Liberian dwellings: one or two sparsely furnished, dirt-floored rooms with an outside kitchen that's protected from the elements by a piece of corrugated iron.

The young men digging the wells that day were in their late teens and early 20s, their lean physiques draped in ragged shorts and castoff American t-shirts. They worked quickly and confidently, needing no direction from their boss, Steve Parker.

Parker is a Liberian businessman who learned to dig wells at a refugee camp in neighboring Cote d'Ivoire during the war. When the war ended, Parker was one of 200,000 Liberian refugees living in surrounding countries. He returned and built a successful contracting business tied to Liberia's reconstruction.

Parker has hired a number of young men who are ex-combatants who've gone through what's known as DDRR training — demobilization, disarmament, rehabilitation and re-integration — from another local nonprofit. He recently brought on eight laborers skilled in digging wells and installing hand pumps. He didn't plan to select men who fought against each other during the civil war, but that's exactly what happened.

In fact, three men were very familiar with one another.

All three fought with their respective sides in Sinoe; one of them for the government, the other two for an ethnically based militia known as the Movement for Democracy in Liberia. The two militia members, Parker told me, remember kidnapping the government man when he was out looking for food. They tied him up, made him work for them, and could have killed him — like they did several others. Eventually, however, he was released and managed to return home.

Now, several years later, these three men find themselves on the same team, working to rebuild what they'd helped to destroy. During my visit, I found them among part of a group finishing up work on three wells. They acted like any trio of friends or colleagues. They were serious about the work, which was difficult, dangerous and required no small amount of coordination. Heavy concrete culverts needed to be lined up precisely and lowered into the well. But while doing the heavy work, they were also chatting and laughing with each other.

In a broad sense, Mercy Corps' five-county infrastructure project is helping a large swath of Liberia rebuild the schools and bridges and water sources that are essential to progress as a healthy and productive society. It's giving large numbers of young men, many of them demobilized combatants, a renewed purpose and a way to make an honest living.

But as I watched these three young people, I realized that we're providing not only the benefits of clean water and temporary jobs. We are creating opportunities for former antagonists to join together in building a more hopeful future, and for moments of cooperation and solidarity that form the building blocks of peace and reconciliation.