Morgan's "Amazzi" Story

I love water. I love thinking about how the natural environment recycles it and about the way people use it and abuse it. I love thinking about the myriad of uses water serves in our lives, from hydration to energy to nutrients for crops. I have taken over ten classes in my major, Environmental Engineering, with “water” in the title, and one of my favorites was been “Watersheds and Wetlands.” My honors thesis is about wastewater treatment in Uganda, and here is some of what I learned.

People often think of all of Africa as a dry, water-starved savannah. But in reality, many parts of the country are in tropical climates that experience heavy rainfall and do not want for freshwater.

Sipi Falls. Kapchorwa, Uganda, 2013.

Uganda, located along the equator, is one of those relatively water-rich places. The water problems there focus less on finding adequate quantities of water and more on treating the plentiful existing water to improve quality. One of the biggest concerns is safe treatment of wastewater, or sewage water. In parts of the world like the United States, most people are used to wastewater being piped out of homes, into treatment plants, and ultimately out to oceans or other large water bodies. Uganda is a bit different because it does not have such extensive centralized piped wastewater systems. Piped wastewater only exists in cities, and even where it does exist, large treatment plants do not. Wastewater is piped from homes to smaller-scale treatment systems like ponds systems.

In pond systems, unsafe organic materials in wastewater are consumed by microbes and inactivated by the sun. The water that comes out of these systems flows into the local environment via rivers and streams. People live and farm near these water bodies and use the water for irrigating and fertilizing their crops, for washing their cars, for cleaning their homes, and for hydrating their livestock. So it is important that the water is safe.

Measuring flow rates between ponds, with help. Mbale, Uganda, 2013.

I spent my summer learning about these wastewater treatment systems and the way farmers interact with wastewater effluent. It was surprising just how different the systems are and how much more contact people have with household effluent in Uganda. Here in a suburban area in the United States, we pay for our wastewater to disappear. But in the urban/peri-urban places I went in Uganda, many people understand the value of this resource that we take for granted in the United States and use it for irrigation and fertilization.

Perhaps as a side effect of this closer connection to water, I noticed a relatively high level of knowledge about wastewater amongst the people I interviewed. While many of my peers in the United States have no idea what happens to their wastewater, almost every person I met in Ugandan cities knew to some degree where their wastewater went and the risks associated with using it to farm, bathe, wash clothes, etc. This phenomenon taught me that even though systems in the United States may be very advanced, our American society’s awareness of the systems that service it are not all that they could be!

A regal - read: repulsive! - Marabou Stork in Ntinda, Kamapala, Uganda. 2013.

P.S. Amazzi means water in Luganda, one of the most commonly spoken languages in Uganda.