Two sisters: Two worlds
Story by Kari Costanza / Photos by Jon Warren
The village well is making noises again.
It’s unwelcome news for sisters Firdaoussou, 12, and Mahana, 9. They’re hungry and they need water to cook porridge. The two girls are always hungry and thirsty — one of the few things they have in common.
Firdaoussou
Firdaoussou is bitter. She had the misfortune of being born the first girl. That means she will never go to school. “She’s the only one who can help me,” says her mother, Aissa, 35, also a first-born daughter. “Because in our culture, girls are the ones who are in charge of doing the housework.”
Firdaoussou will live a life of servitude, helping her mother cook and clean. In a few years, she will marry and start her own family. And her firstborn daughter will follow in her dismal footsteps. It is the way of life for the oldest daughter in Niger.
Mahana
Girls like Mahana, born second, have more options. A bright light shines within Mahana. She can’t help but smile. She smiles when she talks about going to school and when she talks about playing with her friends and little brother Razak, 6, especially how they play tag, running and laughing in the hot sun of West Africa.
“I don’t play games,” says Firdaoussou, whose name means heaven or paradise. “I only help my mother.” She sits against the family’s hut, curled in a tight ball, nearly swallowed up by her clothing. Birth order has determined her lot in life. And growing up in a place without clean water has made things harder.
Life without water
It’s easy to take clean water for granted if you have it. With a turn of the tap, water for drinking, cooking, and bathing flows. But around the world, 771 million people lack access to clean water. The burden falls primarily on women and girls like Firdaoussou, who walk an average of 6 kilometers a day to haul 40 pounds of water.
The village well in Kulmado, Niger, is about a quarter mile from the sisters’ home — a tall hut made of clay held together by tree branches with a thatched roof that leaks when it rains. All six family members — two sisters, two brothers, and their parents — sleep in the hut’s one hot room.
It’s hot outside, too — 111 degrees today. The World Bank reports that temperatures here are rising 1.5 times faster than in other places in the world. Kulmado is in Dosso Region, in Niger’s panhandle. Today the panhandle feels like it was left too long on the stove. Everyone needs water on this scorcher of a day, but no one can get it — because the village well is making noises again.
Three young men stride to the well, resolute, carrying thick canvas ropes. One, sporting the red and blue striped jersey of Messi, the international soccer star from Argentina, affixes a contraption of ropes and straps to the legs of a second young man wearing a harness.
The Messi fan and a third man, a hat shielding his head from the blistering sun, lower their courageous friend down into the well. He looks nervous but determined.
After a few minutes, the young man is hoisted back up, his arms encircling a plastic bucket full of muck. The water is filthy — brownish yellow. He plucks out the plastic bags that have danced their way into the well on the wings of Niger’s hot afternoon winds, traveling from a nearby market before spiraling down. But there’s more.
The reason for all the noise looks up from the bucket: a big brown frog.
Kulmado before
Life in Kulmado used to be much easier. Happier. Seventeen years ago, the well was new. It had a cover to keep the dirt and debris out. Frogs couldn’t hop inside and lay eggs. But the cover has long since deteriorated.
Back then, the rains came on time. Villagers could depend on the seasons. They planted before the rains came, and crops would grow to feed everyone.
“It used to be all green,” says Oumarou Moussa, the village chief. “There used to be [greens], carrots, potatoes, radishes, tomatoes, cabbages. It was green throughout the year. During the rainy season, it was full of vegetables.”
Oumarou, 58, has been chief of Kulmado for seven years.
He sits close to his nephew, Boubacar Amadou, 53, under a neem tree, its green leaves smooth and glossy. The men are good friends — and their friendship has endured many tough seasons, like the hardy tree that gives them shade on this hot, dry day. They finish each other’s thoughts. “In those days there used to be a lot of joy here,” says Boubacar. “No one was complaining about poverty. Those days, even if your staple crops weren’t good, you could sell other things in the market and make food out of it.”
“Now people just come to my house to beg for food,” interjects the chief.
“Now they just think about the old days,” adds Boubacar.
He gestures to a wide swath of land. It stretches from where the men sit under the neem tree to the village well. The land, about the size of a football field, is surrounded by a fence. “It used to be a garden,” he says. “That’s why we built the fence — to protect the garden from animals. All the surrounding villages used to come to us to get their vegetables.”
Firdaoussou and Mahana’s mother, Aissa, remembers the garden wistfully. “I remember we used to grow salad there,” she says. “And cabbage. We used to use what we had in the garden and mix it with what we had in the house — cassava — and make meals. Anytime we were hungry, we could just make food and eat.”
Mahana misses the potatoes they used to grow in the garden. Firdaoussou misses green vegetables. Now she mostly eats the millet that her father grows. “It’s not good at all,” she says. The water isn’t good either. Both girls hate the frogs. If Firdaoussou pulls up a bucket with frogs she immediately dumps the water out. “When I see frogs in the well,” says Mahana, “I am scared and my heart aches.”
Kulmado today
With the well purged of frogs for now, Mahana, Firdaoussou, and their mother walk through what used to be the garden, now just sand littered with cow dung, a few scattered chicken feathers, and yellowing leaves from the neem trees.
They arrive at the water source and attach a bucket to an old tire wheel. “We are facing many problems because of this water,” says Aissa. “Because the water is dirty, it brings stomach pains, diarrhea, and skin rash. We can see the water is dirty, especially when things fall inside it — plastic bags, leaves, frogs.”
And the water in this well isn’t just filthy, it’s dangerous. One of Firdaoussou’s friends died of bilharzia, caused by tiny worms that contaminate water sources in places like Kulmado and infect people through the skin or through drinking.
The girls let the bucket slide down and pull it up, filled with dirty water but no frogs. Around them, flies buzz. Animals have been here. You can see their tracks and the dung they’ve left behind.
Along with water, the lack of food has become a big issue in Kulmado. “Every day people come to my place,” says Chief Oumarou. “Usually, when they come it is with complaints: ‘The kids haven’t eaten today or yesterday. The kids are crying. I can only give them one bowl of corn or millet.’”
In Kulmado, children have even stopped going to school because they get too hungry. There are 110 children in primary school and eight in high school. Students don’t advance far. Since the school was built in 2003, only two children have reached university, and one dropped out.
Firdaoussou has convinced herself that she would hate school. “All my friends who were enrolled at school have always complained about being hungry there,” she says. But Mahana feels for her sister. “It hurts me a lot to see that my sister doesn’t go to school,” she says.
“One cannot study well with hunger,” says Firdaoussou. “One can’t be focused in class with an empty stomach. Most of the children in the community leave school because of hunger. That’s why many of them fail in school.”
Mahana’s teacher, Boubacar Kari, confirms this. “When children don’t have enough food, attendance and the learning is difficult,” says Boubacar. “When they have not eaten at home, they interrupt the lesson and say, ‘Teacher, we are hungry.’ They do not listen to me anymore.”
Hunger is a problem for Mahana at school, too. “I am very hungry,” she says. “I get hungry in the morning when I wake up. I feel it in my stomach. Like a pain. I[feel] like there is something turning in my stomach. I try to drink water to fight the hunger in my stomach.”
Concerns for Fataou
The girls’ older brother, Fataou, 14, dropped out of school while his dad was away working in neighboring Benin for much of 2022. Mustafa, 45, took some of the money he raised by farming and bought fabrics and shoes to sell in Benin’s markets. It doesn’t appear to have helped the family’s income much.
“When I came back, I saw Fataou wasn’t going to school,” says Mustafa. It’s a source of contention between the parents. Aissa allowed Fataou to drop out because he didn’t have a school lunch. “It is difficult to find food,” says Aissa. “It is a public shame if I can’t send them with food.” Now Fataou has even fewer prospects for the future. “My son’s situation worries me,” Mustafa says, “because no father will be happy to see his child sitting without any objective in life.”
Fataou lives in a country ranked third-to-last on the Human Development Index, a metric that measures the health of nearly every country globally. Countries with the lowest scores are plagued by widespread poverty, poor education, and limited healthcare. They have low income, high birth rates, and low life expectancies. In Niger, only about half the population has access to clean water.
But perhaps Niger’s biggest challenge is the emergence of terrorism. Once a peaceful country, Niger faces terrorists on every one of its seven borders. Chief Oumaro knows that terrorist groups can become a magnet for young men. So far, he says, none of the young men from Kulmado has joined a terrorist group, but they have moved to neighboring countries in West Africa, such as Ghana and Togo, looking for work. Searching for hope.
Kulmado in the future
Hope is what’s needed in Kulmado — the hope that comes with clean water. In other communities in Niger, hope is springing forth as World Vision improves access to clean water by drilling new boreholes and restoring water points. In addition to equipping families with water close to home, World Vision is installing water systems at schools and health clinics and providing communities and families with tools to ensure proper hygiene and sanitation practices — reaching over 1.3 million people across the country in the past 15 years.
World Vision recently completed construction of a mechanized water system at a nearby health center that could also provide water to villagers in Kulmado, ending their reliance on the dirty well.
Clean water has had a great impact in combating waterborne and sanitation-related diseases, keeping children in school, and helping to alleviate hunger — as clean water works in tandem with nutritious food to prevent malnutrition.
“Clean water would help us keep clean and we would be healthier,” says Mahana. “And we would be happier.” Much happier, she feels, without frogs. Even Firdaoussou brightens at the thought: “If we get clean water, I will rest,” she says, “because I won’t need to go to the well every morning. I will be so happy.” And, perhaps, she could fulfill a dream she holds close: learning to sew and starting a business someday. That dream and a fresh start for everyone in the community could become reality with the gift of clean water.
Tabita Ali Soumaila of World Vision’s Niger office contributed to this story.
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