There aren’t many footballing grandmothers – let alone ones who double as coaches. And you wouldn’t expect to find them in the rural heartland of Madagascar. But then you wouldn’t have met Juliette Razaravao.
Hailing from the village of Ambohimanatrika, some 50km from the capital, Antananarivo (“Tana”), Juliette fell in love with football as a military wife. She brought her passion back home, where she set about teaching other females in the village the sport. Not that they took to it immediately. “It was really difficult [at first]. It took us two months to get used to it, before we could get on the field and show people what we were made of!” But hard work paid off. “The very first time we played a match, we won. So we’re quite good! And I’ve taught all my daughters and granddaughters too.”
Football may be a passion, but it doesn’t put food on the table, at least not in a remote Malagasy village. The surrounding countryside is beautiful, and most villagers have their own little farms, but it’s not enough to make a living. So at the age of 56, Juliette still rises before dawn to make her way to the nearby town of Manjakandriana, where she works as a porter, unloading trucks.
And when she comes home after work, another chore awaits. Before she can cook the rice for the evening meal, the grandmother of 11 must scramble down a steep slope, fill buckets of dirty water from a hand-dug well and then clamber back up the hill. While strong from her job, she says: “I suffer because I am already getting old, and it is difficult uphill. I have slipped when it has been wet.”
Like many people in Madagascar, she doesn’t have piped water in her house – indeed there isn’t a tap in the whole of the village.
But that’s something that is set to change, thanks to WaterAid. Working with the local community, it has already piped clean, fresh water to a nearby village, and is planning to do the same for Ambohimanatrika. It’s a move that can’t come a moment too soon, says Juliette’s daughter-in-law, Evelyne. “We would really love our village to have a tap,” she says, adding that it would not only help her wash laundry close by, saving her a long walk with heavy loads, but it would make an enormous difference to her children, who would be healthier, with more chance of doing well at school.
Juliette’s 11-year-old granddaughter Rova helps her out, collecting firewood and picking cassava leaves, as well as with water duties. Small for her age and a little hard of hearing, she takes pride in what she can manage. “I use a big bucket to get the water. I carry it under my arm. I am strong!
“We often find worms, fish or plastic bottles [in the water],” she says. “Drinking it without boiling it makes me sick. In the evening, we go to the river to wash. It’s nice, but sometimes we get itchy skin when too many ducks and geese have been in there.”
It sounds like a tough life in general, and it is. But set against all the hardship is a wonderful warmth among the villagers, most of whom are one big extended family. Evenings often find Juliette sitting outside her house, with an array of grandkids around her, helping make the dinner. “Grandma likes it when I sit and pull the grey hairs out of her head,” says nine-year-old Mamy Eddy. “I’m happy to do it, but she’s got so many that I get bored very quickly!”
Unlike Juliette’s generation, the grandchildren all go to school, and that gives her hope they’ll find more fulfilling work, but it’s hard to concentrate on studies when they are so often falling ill from unclean water. When they are sick, Juliette follows her mother’s advice, and treats them with a herb that grows locally. “We have to use traditional medicine, as going to the hospital is very expensive, and we can’t afford it.”
Poor health goes hand in hand with dirty water, says Dr Bakoarivony, who runs the health centre in the nearby market town of Manjakandriana. From here, she does her best to help the children in 20 villages, including Ambohimanatrika – working alone with just two volunteer paramedics as support. “The water is a breeding ground for parasites and fungal infections,” she says, and that means that debilitating attacks of diarrhoea are all too common in children. “Women who give birth at home without clean water to hand are also putting their lives and those of their children at risk,” she adds.
The residents of the village have done their best to protect their only water sources, partially covering them with concrete, and introducing fish in an effort to eat up the tiny worms that thrive in the waste. When they can, they boil the water before drinking it, too.
But that only goes so far, so the sooner clean water comes to the area, says Bakoarivony, the better. Now, working with local partners, including Jirama (Madagascar’s water utility), WaterAid plans to have connections in place in this village and eight others nearby this year. Water will be pumped from two local lakes, via a treatment facility, and there’s enough supply for the pipelines to be extended over time, deeper into the countryside.
That will make for much healthier villages, with children better able to succeed at school, and their parents with more time to make a living, building healthier, more prosperous futures.
WaterAid has teamed up with Fujifilm to document life in villages in Madagascar. They’re helping Malagasy children tell their own stories by giving them cameras to document their daily lives, as part of the Access Denied appeal. The results are captured in a beautiful book, Madagascar in the frame, and an exhibition open until the end of January at London’s Fujifilm House of Photography. Click here to find out more.
Since 2012, Fujifilm has donated a total of more than £525,000 to support WaterAid’s work around the globe.
