Safe drinking water in Mampong isn’t really much of an issue; at leat not in the traditional sense. While there isn’t much in the way of running water, drinking water is widely available and cheap to purchase. Unlike Canada, water isn’t really sold in water bottles. You can buy it that way, it’s just not popular. Mainly water is sold in small 500ml bags, called water sachets. They’re about 5 pesewas per bag, that’s probably something like 3 cents Canadian. It’s an interesting situation though. There was a study done to calculate what the price of water sachets shoud be. It turns out that 5 pesewas per bag is the most that people would be willing to pay. If it was any more, people would start drinking out out of the streams and that would start a huge pile of health and sanitation issues.

The problem lies with the way garbage is disposed of here. There is no garbage collection, or waste collection of any kind. In order to get rid of trash, it’s either littered along the sides of roads, in gutters, everywhere, or burned. Not good for the environment, and not so fun to breathe in either. Water sachets literally blanket the streets.

Food waste, allthough there really isn’t much (people don’t waste here, if they can help it) is mostly given to the chickens, goats and lizzards that roam around. Okay, I’m joking about the lizzards but they are EVERYWHERE.

From a personal view, I really don’t like water sachets. While it is a clean, safe, sanitary way to provide water, I think that the impact on the environment is terrible. I’m not sure that there are any easy solutions though. Years ago, they used to sell drinking water in big containers and you’d just dip your cup into it. Maybe I’m just cynical, but that seems like a lot of trust to place in a complete stranger.

In Canada, we are so lucky to have the infrastructure that provides us with safe and easy drinking water. Is it too much to say that we go overboard? The water we shower with is safe to drink. The water we flush our toilets with are safe to drink. We wash our clothes with “safe” water. It all seems a bit much. I can only think of the ridiculous amounts of money we spend on purifying water that doesn’t need to be. How can we create  infrastructure in countries that makes sense? After all this I’m only left with questions. It reminds me of those advertisements for antibacterial everything. At what point have we gone to far?

Pollution in Local Stream

Water Sachet