Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (18 page)

‘It’s a village house,’ he said. ‘My apologies if it’s not up to the standard of the city, but I hope you will be comfortable. We greet you as one of our own, Charley. You are part of the village.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for making me welcome.’ I shook hands with him again and with his wife and their young children. Then they left me alone and I opened the letters from home.

EVERY CHILD IN THE WORLD has the right to drink clean water. That’s not some idealistic statement, it’s a fact. Every country has signed up to it and UNICEF is at the forefront of the efforts to make it a reality. Ewan has been a UNICEF ambassador for a number of years now, but prior to
Long Way Round
I had not had much to do with them. Since then, however, I’ve been privileged to visit nine or ten of their projects around the world.

The Cendana Putih project focused on providing safe drinking water. The village was established in the 1960s by Javanese migrants, who sank the original wells. When UNICEF came to inspect them, most were found to be contaminated. The plan was to dispose of all the existing pumps and install new ones, together with an adequate water-filtration system.

We were working at the home of Waniasri and Sumarna, whose four-year-old son, Adrianto, suffered from what they called a rigid stomach, a debilitating ailment caused by bacterial infection from drinking contaminated water. He was prone to severe and very regular tummy upsets and was clearly in distress when we met him, clinging to Sumarna the whole time we were there. The family had no way of cleansing their water other than a laborious tablet-based system whereby each pot had to be left for at least two days. This new system should have a huge impact, and stop poor Adrianto from falling ill in the future.

 

 

It was a fairly straightforward process. We built two shelves onto the back wall of the house, one above the other, and then placed three plastic barrels on each shelf. These were linked by a series of plastic pipes that culminated in a single pipe with a tap fitted to it. The filtration was gravity-based and completely natural; there were no chemicals and no tablets, just a layer of scrubbed stones and a layer of sand separated by a sheet of mesh.

The first job was to wash the stones in a wheelbarrow. It was hard work in the heat, hosing the stones down and scrubbing them. We did the same with a barrow-load of sand. It was painstaking work - before I’d done half of it the sweat was pouring off me. But this was a vital part of the process: the cleaner the stones, the better the water was filtered.

Once everything was clean we heaped a few shovelfuls of stones in the bottom of each barrel and covered them with mesh netting before spreading the sand. When the sand was settled we fixed a short section of pipe in the barrel, one end floating while the other passed through an outlet cut in the side.

This done, we connected each barrel to a series of T-bends and further pipes that fed the lower shelf of drums. These were connected to the single pipe and tap. Finally a much wider-gauge pipe had to be connected inside the well. The only way to accomplish this was to hang over the side while two guys held my legs. I just about managed it without falling headlong into the muddy water.

A few minutes later I went into the house, switched on the pump, and watched as muddy brown water pumped into the upper barrels. Gradually the water seeped through the first layers of filtration, leaving behind little bits of dirt and stone, before flowing into the barrels on the second set of shelves. There it was filtered a second time, before ending up in the single pipe.

It was simple and effective. By the time we’d run the system through, all we had to do was turn on the tap and clear water flowed out. The pump kicked in automatically and the barrels on the upper shelf were refilled. Turn off the tap, the barrels settled and the clean water backed up. Taking a glass I scooped some water from the upper barrels then filled another from the tap. One glass was dirty brown and the other completely clear. I showed them to Claudio. ‘Tell me if that is not fantastic,’ I said.

Waniasri and Sumarna were delighted. Now all they had to do was step outside their back door, turn on a tap and they had clean water. Their neighbours were pretty pleased too, because until each house had the system installed, every ten would share.

I was thrilled. The first person we had met that morning had been a four-year-old boy with a fever caused by drinking contaminated water, and just a few hours later we had installed a filtration system that fulfilled the global pledge. Physically it was the toughest UNICEF task I’d undertaken - hard work under the hot sun. But it was also one of the most satisfying, with immediately visible results. The difference it would make to this family was immeasurable.

Sumarna told me about her other son. At fourteen he had to have a white shirt as part of his school uniform, and trying to keep a shirt clean in the old well water was impossible. Now they had clean water to drink, and they would have clean clothes as well.

More than five thousand children a day die from diseases contracted from poor sanitation and contaminated drinking water. A few hours of labour, a pump, six barrels, some pipes and some gravel and this family no longer had to worry.

 

 

We were not far from Rantepao, a town in the Toraja region famed for its extravagant funerals. So with the filter system in place we said goodbye to Adrianto’s family, and the UNICEF crew gave us a lift back down to the coastal town of Palopo. From the mountain road we could see the dome of a mosque dominating hundreds of red roofs, while beyond it the quay drifted as a thin, black line into the sea where a single container ship lay alongside.

Almost immediately after the UNICEF people left we hitched a lift with the owner of a pick-up truck, who took us on to the village of Siguntu. We arrived just after dark. There were no streetlights, of course, and unless we put on head torches we couldn’t really see anything. We could hear the shriek of night birds, though, and the squealing of hundreds of pigs. It was hard to make out where we were exactly and it was a little eerie, the houses nothing more than shadows.

A local man called Luther showed us to a house with steep steps leading up to the front door and even steeper ones leading to our bedroom. One of the roof supports was a mass of buffalo horns, which at first glance looked a little intimidating. But there was a comfortable-looking mattress on the floor and, according to Claudio, within minutes I was snoring.

Waking at sunrise, I pushed open a wooden shutter and saw a grassy thoroughfare bordered by the most amazing houses. The living area of our house was spread over a couple of floors, but the building was dominated by the roof. A sort of heavy thatch, it climbed sharply at either end. It was really bizarre, I’d never seen anything like it. It looked almost saddle-shaped, with the tall gables and the dip in the middle.

I took a wander through the village with Luther. All we could hear were pigs, screeching and squealing - there were pigs in individual pens attached to each of the houses. Luther explained that they are revered here almost as much as the buffalo. Animals form a large part of the local currency; buffalo (particularly males) can be worth a lot of money. They don’t look like the Cape buffalo I saw in Africa; they’re smaller and less muscular, more like oxen maybe, with their massive sweeping horns.

Both pigs and buffalo are reared with tender loving care. The pigs get a hot mash twice a day and the buffalo only the best grass. They’re a family’s most prized possession because they are bred for the most important time for any Torajan - their funeral. Every morning the women cut and cook vegetables for the pigs, and the buffalo are even more mollycoddled. The male sleeps in what Luther called a ‘cottage’, a large shed at the far end of the village. They get the best stall and bedding and a man’s primary job is to cut enough grass to keep his buffalo fed. The females are taken onto the hillside to graze, but the male stays in his cottage until about 10 a.m., while his master prepares his food.

Using a hand sickle he cuts what he needs then goes to collect the bull. He leads him down the valley and then feeds him the grass by hand. When the buffalo has had enough he’s free just to hang out or wallow in the mud. If he gets too dirty his master will wash him, then feed him again before taking him home.

Neither the pigs nor the buffalo are slaughtered for meat, except for a funeral. Sometimes a buffalo might be traded for a car, though - a spotted buffalo can be worth upwards of £8000.

Their primary purpose, however, is to be given as funeral gifts. Most families attend five or six funerals a year. These are lavish affairs lasting three days, and the more important you are the more guests you have. Luther took me to one in a neighbouring village, where the houses were built around a dusty square. The home of the deceased was open, the walls of the ground floor folded back and the whole building painted a vivid red. The floors were spread with mats for the guests to sit on and the square between the houses looked like a livestock market. Honestly, it was bedlam. People kept arriving with pigs in the back of their trucks; you couldn’t hear anything above the squealing. There were about a dozen buffalo in the square already, together with a bunch of pigs either loose or trussed to bamboo poles.

The funeral was for a lady called Augustina Posi Thumaman, who had passed away six months before, aged seventy. Her family had kept her body in the house until they could afford the funeral. Luther told me that some people spend their entire lives saving for their funerals, and some parents didn’t send their children to school because they wanted the money they could earn in the fields to buy the best buffalo. We had no pigs or buffalo to offer, so we took a couple of cartons of cigarettes, which Luther said was the right thing to do because everyone in Sulawesi smokes.

I could see Augustina’s casket from the square. Beautifully carved and decorated with old Indonesian coins, it was displayed on the upper floor of the house and accessed by a bamboo ladder. Buffalo horns hung on the walls and the floor was laid with rugs. Augustina had been mother to five children and there were lots of grandchildren. They were all there and all had invited their own guests. What really amazed me was that each invited guest subsequently invited guests of their own. They would bring gifts of pigs or buffalo and check them in with the master of ceremonies before taking them to show to the family. Once the gift had been presented, the family would note down who gave what and how big it was, so when the time came they could reciprocate without any embarrassment.

It was all very serious, and it seemed to be much more about the guests’ social standing than a ceremony to remember the deceased. Luther explained that if an invited guest did not show up with a whole bunch of guests of their own, they were clearly neither popular nor important. The number of people who ‘followed’ an invited guest would determine how many pigs or buffalo he brought. If he brought two beasts, one would be given to the family of the dead person and one kept back to feed the guests he’d invited. I watched women arriving with great baskets of rice strapped to their foreheads; I saw men carrying bamboo cups and others with jerry cans of palm wine. The family of the deceased would designate a room for each invited guest and their guests, and it would be the invited guest’s responsibility to feed them.

It was quite extraordinary and extremely chaotic, what with trucks arriving and the incessant squealing of pigs. The pigs were carried in on sacrificial scaffolds and when it was time to eat them they were stabbed behind the shoulder with a sharp knife. It was not something I liked to watch, but I suppose if you’re going to enjoy your bacon sandwich you’d better be prepared to see how that sandwich is made.

There were no bacon sandwiches here, of course. I was treated to palm wine and a plate of chillied pig’s liver. God it was hot! Just one bite and I thought my tongue was going to swell up and suffocate me.

I spent some time with a lady called Veronica, a guest who lived in Australia. She was from Sulawesi originally; her birth home rather than her life home, as she put it. She told me that the deceased’s younger sister had been her neighbour and years ago the old woman used to visit them. I asked her what she thought about keeping the body in the house for six months.

‘It’s normal. We inject the body with formaldehyde and it can stay with us for more than a year. You see, when the person dies their spirit leaves the body, but if we keep it then the spirit remains around us until we let it go.’

‘At the funeral.’

‘That’s right.’

 

 

Luther and I hopped in a motorised becak to visit the burial grounds in the cliffs above the neighbouring village of Lemo. The coffins are placed in holes in the walls and the narrow path up is laced with piles of bones and human skulls. Macabre, to say the least. A little further we came upon the village of Kete Kesu, a living museum to the Torajan culture. High above the village is a large burial cave that is still in use. We could tell one of the coffins was relatively fresh because the stench was so foul as I entered the cave that I almost gagged. I couldn’t move without my T-shirt covering my nose, but taking a good look around I was amazed to find not only numerous coffins, but bottles of water, bags and cups. There was even an electric fan and a copy of the phone book. Initially I thought that this must be a burial ground and a dumping ground, but all this stuff had been placed here deliberately - the creature comforts you might need for the next stage of your journey.