Many groups of people have come through the lead poisoned villages in Zamfara. They have drawn blood, tested water and soil, even taken samples from livestock to assess the potential for continued exposure through contaminated meat. Others have come to do various forms of health messaging. But they’re all here for short periods of time, some never coming back to give the test results to the communities. Health messaging campaigns lasted days or weeks when done by international NGOs. The region is difficult to reach, harsh to live and work in, and the culture is vastly different from even the state capitol two hours away, let alone the federal seat in Abuja where most NGOs are based.
We’ve had a very unique opportunity to spend the better part of the past year here, not commuting from the city, but living at the equivalent of the county seat. The nature of the remediation work demands that we interact with people in the affected communities on a very intrusive and intimate level; we go into their homes, ask lots of personal questions, test everywhere and then dig most of their floors up. We do this with crews of local people and often end up working next to them, shoveling soil, carrying sacks, and wheel barrowing clean soil backfill. Effectively, we really get to know people. This makes the task of community level advocacy for sustainable remediation much easier for us because as men remove the contaminated soil from their own village, they begin to understand the nature of lead poisoning, how it came to be such a problem, and how it can be prevented in the future.
The advocacy component of remediation took months of work and several villages of remediation experience before we really had an effective strategy worked out. To pretend that it could be done in the course of a few weeks or that it could be developed from an office in the city would be absurd – one of the reasons we’re here for this trip is that we didn’t have time to question what an effective advocacy program should include in the first few villages we remediated due to the emergency nature of project at that time.
All of this is to say that our aim is to have the local government staff that we’ve been working with implement an advocacy program that we all pieced together during the last year of remediating 7 villages and characterizing one more. And rather than use vague terms to describe how it will be done at the community level with solutions coming from the villages, not from state or federal authorities, I’d like to close with a photograph of a different type of sustainable health messaging. An NGO placed two billboards were placed in each of the 5 effected villages on the dangers of bringing ore processing into the home. The literacy rate in these villages is as low as 20% in some areas. And the message was developed in Gusau, not by local leaders or miners in the communities.
We’ve griped about this since the billboards went up. But upon visiting one village last week, we yelled at our driver to “Stop! Stop!” as we left for the day. On top of a grain storage unit sat a familiar piece of metal. They had taken the message and used it in the most appropriate way they could think of – as scrap metal to cover a grain store. It’s sustainable insofar as the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ element of sustainability goes. It’s also a very expensive roof – over one million US dollars went into a health messaging campaign that culminated in several community dialogues, the training of ‘focal people’ in each village, and, of course, billboards.
Certainly we don’t have the answer for all of these problems and the possibility that ‘safer mining’ practices simply fails in some areas is very real. People often repeat to us the mantra that our group and others have repeated in these villages: don’t bring ore home, wash and change clothes before returning from the processing areas, no children should work with ore, etc. But this is the same as recycling a billboard – it’s there, but how will it really be utilized?
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