How can you expect someone to demand or expect or even hope for better for themselves when they can’t even drink the water?

I recently learned that despite the fact that water in seronga does indeed occasionally run, many of the nurses from the clinic have their drinking water brought back in jugs from somewhere else.
I guess in some ways this isn’t that different from people drinking bottled water in the states, if people have access and money to do so, why not? But then I realized that what often causes the children to be sick is contaminated water and bad hygiene, which is, as a fellow American recently pointed out, a condescending euphemism for a number of social problems. After experiencing my own sickness and frustration with this, water and the lack thereof has taken a heightened place on my radar.
The water can be imbibed safely right from the middle of the delta that surrounds us. The same delta which flows haphazardly, cutting us off from most other places and making obtaining nearly any other supplies expensive and impossible. This luxury of clean water is available, for those of course, who have a boat to get to the middle of the delta, where the sea grasses purify and clean it. Despite popular tourist attractions that make it appear to the contrary, most Africans in and around the delta have been “developed” and westernized enough that they no longer have or use traditional makowas (boats) to travel the delta.
The water at this point has become a pretty strong metaphor for me. I’ve been suffering a bit in the sea of substance abuse and sense of defeatism present in this village (this culture?) to find the purpose in some of this. To understand why the people of the “Eden of Africa” are willing to suffer so much. To know how there can be so little in a land of plenty. It’s hard to help people who want something for themselves less than you want it for them, or when you think they deserve it more than they do.
Not a day goes by without someone (almost always a Motswana) trying to tell me how I need to “fix” something happening here, or implement change or essentially try to force it on people. And being an American, it’s nearly part of my nature to want to analyze and fix the “problem” of HIV, the lack of electricity, clean water, ect. and it’s a constant personal mental retraining process to remember why I’m here, how sustainable change happens, and that cultural shift must come from within the community and will take more time than I will be here.
I’ve tried explaining to those who are a little more sophisticated in their communication abilities (read: not constantly asking me and begging me for stuff) that I would give the people of Seronga the sun, moon and stars if they could figure out that that is what they want. I seriously have a drive to help “these people” like what. It’s so hard to remember that they have to want it themselves, and that part of my purpose here is to help the people of Seronga identify what could and would make their lives better. To help them develop and implement change and ideas for change. I would dig a ditch alongside the people of Seronga with a rusty can under the hot sun for the rest of my days here if I thought that would get this village clean, constant running water, but it’s just not a priority, or at least enough of a priority that people want to actively do something about it. So perhaps the water will be one of the things that bends me, as I constantly try to change it….