Editor's Note: This investigation was conducted by the Objective investigative reporting project in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, a Kyiv Post partner. The program is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action.
LOZOVA, Moldova — George Doska from Lozova village in central Moldova has recently turned 40 and made himself a valuable present.
He took all the money he earned working at
construction sites abroad and built himself a solid three-story house.
But even though Doska’s little mansion may seem
almost luxurious from the outside, it doesn’t have one essential thing – a water
supply.
In the village of some 6,000 people, there is no
organized water supply. The villagers, including richer ones like Doska, have
to dig wells and take water from underground.
Digging a well is expensive – it cost Doska $1,500 – and the quailty of
the water is poor. Doska admits that in four years that he has been using the
new well he hasn’t checked the quality of the water in it. It is expensive and
troublesome to order expert tests, he says.
He is not even troubled by the fact that in 1999
some 200 people in his village got infected with hepatitis A, supposedly
because of bad water.
Water problems are common in Moldova. While the
country is successfully moving forward on its way to integrate with the European
Union, most of the nation’s 3.5 million people lack access to clean and safe
drinking water.
Most Moldovans – some 85 percent of the
population – live in the country’s 1,000 villages. And 80 percent of the
villagers don’t have access to clean water supply. In 2007, the government
adopted a Strategy for Providing Water and Sewage Systems for the people of
Moldova, but due to lack of funding, the project still exists on paper only.
The well water poses a serious danger for
health. Apart from the hepatitis risk, the well water proved to have other
dangers.
The National Center for Public Health, based in
Chisinau reported in March 2013 that the quality of drinking water was low. Some
84 percent of the wells in the country provide water that contain chemical
substances like sulfates and fluorine in dangerously high doses.
“Only 15 percent of the villagers have in-house
water supply, in contrast to 80 percent of the population of the cities,” says
doctor Ion Shalaru, deputy head of the National Center for Public Health. “The
villagers mostly use the water from the wells, which is often contaminated with
nitrates, which leads to illnesses, often deadly.”
The victims of a 1999 hepatitis A outbreak in
Lozova still suffer from its consequences.
“I can’t live without medicines even now. I hate
to think how much money the treatment has cost,” says Ion Avraam, a hepatitis A
victim from Lozova.
The situation is complicated with droughts that
often happen in Moldova. In the time of drought, some wells dry out, leaving
villagers with no access to water at all.
The International Monetary Fund lists Moldova as
the poorest state in Europe. It comes as no surprise that the state budget
can’t finance the water programs, and citizens’ best hope is help from foreign
donors. The Swiss government has been most helpful so far. It has been
financing projects aimed to improve the sanitary state of Moldova villages by building
ecologically safe toilets Ecosan that are unaffordable for regular Moldovans.
To build aqueducts that would bring clean water
to the villages, the villages need to get sewage systems too, which means more
money is needed. In Moldova, where an average salary is around $260, citizens
avoid any extra expenses, even when it means health risks. The local budgets
can’t bear this burden either. In Vorniceni, a village in central Moldova, an
aqueduct was built for $70,000, and it doesn’t even reach the whole village.
On a recent hot summer day, an elder woman was
walking along a central street of Gelesht village in Moldova, carrying a heavy
bucket of water.
“It’s my third bucket today,” said the woman,
Maria Budu. “I’ve been bringing home three or four buckets of water every day
all my life. It’s not so bad in summer, but winters are hard.”
With a population of some 3,000 people, Gelesht
is not a small village. And still, it doesn’t have an aqueduct to supply clean
water to the households. Many households have cattle, which influences the
quality of the ground waters badly. The outdoor toilets with pits instead of
sewage systems add to the bad impact.
According to Dr. Boris Strashenyanu from the Strashenskiy
Center for Preventive Medicine, one of the recent water analysis conducted in
Gelesht showed the well water contained excrements.
“The villagers don’t have much land and often
dig a well not far from an outdoor toilet,” Strashenyanu says.
“Also, consider all the illegal landfills and
wide usage of pesticides in farming,” he adds.
It all results in huge health risks. The latest
hepatitis A victims were registered this year in Syrets, another Moldovan
village with no water supply.
Vasil Budu from Gelesht is not looking forward
to an aqueduct to be built in his village, because he expects the quality of
the water to be poor anyway. It is partly because Dnister and Prut, the rivers
that supply 85 percent of Moldova’s water, are known to be polluted.
“What’s the point of having water if it is not
safe to drink?” he says.
Petru Botnaru is a freelance journalist living in Vorniceni, Moldova
