Water, Pure and Simple: George McBean

This is a personal story of me re-visiting friends and former colleagues in Kenya whom I first met almost 50 years ago. But it is also a story to ponder some of the advances that UNICEF has achieved from a slightly different angle. (From outside the bubble as brother Detlef might say.) I’ve included a selection of photos to illustrate -for the visually literate among us.

Present day entrance road to JB Drilling compound and JB Arts and Crafts… Nakuru, Kenya.

 

The JB. compound were both rigs and vehicles never seem to die.

Vehicle are harvested for parts when they no longer function.

The JB compound borders on the Nakuru National Park and offers access to both animals and stunning scenery that seems even more beautiful when you are visiting and not working

A little over ten years ago, when Sara and I retired back to Scotland to live, I wrote to the Guardian Newspaper UK, filled with angst, after reading Clare Short and Ha-Jong Chang's conversation piece on 'How effective is overseas aid?' They published my letter in the comments page – it’s content below. 

‘Although they (the authors of How effective overseas aid?) seem very qualified to answer this question ... they have missed a vital point entirely in their response. How (for example) good ideas that originate in development organisations quickly move to the private sector and develop there. This link between what originates as a thought at a meeting in a development agency and ends up as a component in an industry or social service is rarely made.  

At any given time, the projects and funds from a donor country’s development budget can be examined and criticised but the full picture cannot be found by looking only at the budgets and the physical outcomes of these development agencies. The Guardian's global development professionals network is in a unique position to correct this mono-focus view of development. If you consider the transfer of an idea such as 'children rights' out of the English language and into languages which do not have a word for 'rights' in their vocabulary, then you will begin to see how important the information that surrounds aid is as important as the aid itself. The ratification of the UN convention on the rights of the child was just the beginning and not the end of a process of transfer. (Just as development itself is a process.) When the UN finished the convention ... the true dissemination of what it meant, began. We still have many years ahead of explaining before it becomes practice as well as law.  

As we speak, the woman in Bangladesh who is taking out a bank loan for the first time, the conversations she is having with her husband about educating her daughter are not things that are currently funded by development aid ... but these subjects most certainly can be traced back to a 'development' source. What I'm trying to say is that the scale of current development efforts is far out-matched by the accumulative and ongoing work started by development funds of the past. The big picture of development contains more faces of the public and private sector than it does of faces of those working today for agencies with 'development' in their name.  

One of my earliest memories of working for UNICEF in the mid 70’s was being told by Revi Tuluhungwa in the East Africa Regional Office, that the single most effective health intervention was to provide people with clean drinking water.  As a newly recruited Art and Design Officer in Revi’s team, we worked with eighteen Health Ministries in the region, to help improve their communication capacity. With infant mortality rates high, there was a need to reach new mothers with child health-related information.  Aida Gindy, the Regional Director had highlighted the fact we could only have limited success with the written word, among the 80% of mothers who were ‘pre-literate’ and who felt powerless in a male dominated social structure. With the appointment of James Grant in UNICEF a new era of understanding of Communication was launched, (and frankly, a career in the use of visual communication for development opened up for me.)  

Last month I visited and stayed at the JB Drilling compound in Nakuru, Kenya. This small water drilling company was started in 1981 by Tom and Kristina Belknap, (Tom - a former UNICEF employee). Earlier in the seventies Tom worked with relief efforts in Biafra, Nigeria and with the UNICEF Wau water programme in Sudan.  In 1980 he shipped a small drilling rig from the USA to Juba and began a water drilling business with Sudanese colleagues and technicians.   

JB drilling has worked consistently in Southern Sudan and Kenya drilling bore holes, through civil wars, natural disasters, and political unrest. Since they began, they have averaged some 100 wells per year in South Sudan and 40 or so in Kenya. (The Sudanese government at that time averaged eight bore holes in a year) At one point in the 1980’s if you asked anyone in villages in South Sudan who gave them water… they would say- Mr.Tom (not the government nor any of the aid agencies.)   

Whenever I read or hear fellow communication officers discuss the health messages most important for prevention … and they repeat the flowery language of persuasion, I’m reminded of the technical conversations that these drillers have each month, when they inform communities of success in drilling them a bore hole. These technical exchanges, followed by the sips of clean water that slowly replace the polluted alternatives, turn the tide on health dangers for children, and seem under-appreciated in the preventative health achievement stats.  

Nowadays the JB business includes a Lulu Product section producing Shea butter products including soaps and shampoos, supervised by Kristina. And it has an Arts and Craft Centre where one of the JB partners, John Olander has a thriving business making leather goods and crafts.   

In the photos posted below you will see John as the best man at my wedding to Sara Cameron McBean in Nairobi in 1980. I have also added a few older photos taken during our work adventures … from the days when a lot of UNICEF’s field work was really taking place in fields.  

The other photos show the JB compound today with some of the beautiful environments that surround their work in Kenya. While I was there, the JB team in Naivasha drilled their deepest borehole … some 360 meters from the surface. The drilling was so precise and straight they were able to case the borehole immediately. I recorded the conversation between the on-site driller and John on my cell phone. These priorities in the health sector have not changed, only the method of communicating them has. Where at one time this was a conversation on the radio- today it’s done on a cell phone - and for years it has sounded something like this.  

‘Alpha bravo- this is tango foxtrot- confirming we have pressures of 8 cubic from a depth of 300 metres. Water level is 293 meters.’  

OK Alpha Bravo … good job man, Mabrook. Keep blowing, and we’ll arrange a test pump this week. Over and out. ’ 

To this day – the search and delivery of water, pure and simple and the communication surrounding the use and protection of water is still the prime intervention for improving public health.

Back in time to the late 70’s and early 80’s

A UNICEF handpump in Northern Kenya

Tom Belknap… having just traded a panga (a farming cutlass) for a goat in South Sudan

  

Tom with Phil Snyder… at that time Head of Mount Kenya National Park and later the Boma Plateau in Sudan.

Me, testing visual literacy levels on some UNICEF health aids in Marsabit.

I put this photo of John Olander, Tom Belknap and me at Kilimanjaro…. Because of the amount of snow that was once on the peak!

Driving a UNICEF water truck to Juba through northern Kenya- before there was a proper road (The usual route through Uganda was blocked by the Lord Resistance Army)

Tom’s wife Kristina makes friends with a some Toposa warriors

There was very little traffic back then – but people in the remotest areas, knew of UNICEF.

It’s hard to explain to later generations of UNICEF staff that back in the 70’s in ESARO while Reps had a local driver taking them to official functions- on field trips International staff often drove themselves. The UNICEF Village Technology Unit (which was well ahead of it’s time and supplied many ideas that eventually were produced in the market place) offered me their Land Cruise to do visual literacy research and photograph projects across the country.

Then I met Sara Cameron a young woman studying Anthropology in Kenya.

We married in 1980 and at our small scall wedding reception -posed in front of an abandoned old car we found at a run down hotel in Nairobi.

John Olander was my best man- seen here with Gladys on his shoulders. She is the daughter of a close friend Paulina, also in the photo with her other children. Sara’s bridesmaid was Suzie Armstrong.

Gladys was star attraction at our wedding.

Gladys also helped when our first born Fergus required some child-friendly trips around the neighbourhood on her back.

This is me visting Gladys and her five children last month near the JB Compound. (She had two set of twins)

Kristina became the god-mother of our second child – daughter Ainslie.

I put this photo in to show the farewell party for Aida Gindy when she left Nairobi (my painting as a parting gift in the background.)

On Fergus’s first birthday… Paulina and Gladys built him a small mud hut… in the style of a Kipsegis home. In the custom of the tribe the home owner has to walk into it carrying a fire. So with some help from Sara and friends Fergus managed the ceremony… witness in the background by Karl Eric Knuttson UNICEF”s Regional Director in 1981.

Paulina’s last child was named George and I was lucky to be around at the birth (having been called back to Kenya from Unicef Nepal to help with communication for the drought in the north in 1985.)

I met up with George regularly over the years… he is now a talented artist with leather. Last month is the first I’ve seen him since his mother  Paulina sadly passed away a few years back.)

John Olander, Suzie and I last month enjoying a reunion of wonderful memories.

A Footnote on the final photos shown here.

On an earlier visit to the JB compound in 2008 I discovered a pile of old clothes and reading books that had been donated by locals to be shipped with a drilling rig up to Southern Sudan. Among the books was a tattered copy of a book by Michael Shea… who is an author (and former Press secretary to the Queen in the UK) Sara and I know Michael from Edinburgh. I took his book around the compound and photographed people pretending to be reading Michael’s book. (Also placing the book strategically outside a pit latrine.)

On my next home leave, I met up with Michael at the Edinburgh Book Festival. He asked how I was and where I’d been… so I told him I’d just returned from Kenya. ‘Michael,’ I said, ‘everywhere I travel in Africa… people are reading your book!’ I then showed him some of the 20 photos I’d taken. Michael took this story to heart and printed a selection of these pics (some posted here) and displayed them on his Grand piano. One was placed next to a photo of himself and the Queen. On this latest trip I shared the photos with those in the compound now grown adults and active in the JB business. (Michael passed in 2011… my portrait of him and his wife Mona - who still has these pics.)

The next few are photos I took at JB’s in 2010 -explained in the footnote about Michael Shea’s book.

Sara and I enjoying retirement outside a Tibetan Monastery in Scotland.