For the last few months we have been conducting these water surveys in the surrounding villages. Our procedure is simple; we go down to the villages, we try to find our contact persona and otherwise someone else and we ask them if we could ask some questions, but from this point it becomes slightly more difficult. Most of us don’t speak any Marathi (maybe a bit of Hindi, thodi thodi) and most of the villagers don’t speak any English. Therefore we always ask a Marathi speaker to come with us, to do the translations. However of course sometimes questions and answers are lost in translation, or there is just general misunderstanding. I suppose the most common one is that we ask if we could ask something about the water and the woman nods and we are seated on a mat (so far so good), then you can here a tap running and a long pause and then she returns; holding three cups of water in her hand; Panni?

Although I can’t speak Marathi, I still feel I’m learning something from this experience. Firstly I learn a lot about doing surveys, with that I mean, assessing who to approach, being aware of how you pose a question (the surveyor for instance has to understand the purpose of the question to be able to pose it) and also discovering the thin line of what you can and can’t ask sometimes, addressing the taboos without offending anyone. Also when doing the survey I found out the importance of knowing the communities well, that otherwise there is a big chance that your questions might be misinterpreted. Even more this experience has taught me a lot about the daily life of the communities in Kolwan Valley because although one might say the glasses of water they drink per day is not really going to give you an isight in to their lifes, partly it did. Collecting water is an important part of their daily routine, similiarly with other questions I did feel I got a better view of what their day actually looks like.

During the water surveys I usually had the task of writing down the answers to the questions, a task that seems simple enough but actually wasn’t. Except for the obvious difficulties of having to try to distinguish in the fast conversation between English and Marathi it was also trying to get the answers of the people down as accurately as possible. Again lost in translation-related issues, but also sometimes selecting what is relevant to the survey (is it important enough to mention that the Sacred Grove nearby is annually used for an animal fair?!) and what is irrelevant.

Lastly, I learned where their water is usually from and how they get it and was therefore able to compare it our situation here, and my lack of knowledge on that. Just to compare:

(village) From the river Muslhi in to a well, add tablets to well, have pipes from well to water pump, go from house (10 min) to well with three buckets between specific two hour period that it is open, walk back with 60 litre of water on head

(us) Walk outside the door and open the tap

Written by Ernestine, Comm-d Group