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An introduction to Marofarihy village

Marofarihy is an ordinary rural community in the southeast of Madagascar. What happens when people have access to potable water? Our long-term engagement with the village for over 10 years, in which consecutive research visits have taken place, enabled us to capture this change.

Poverty remains, but behaviorial change has taken place. There is widespread awareness about the importance of potable water. In the following story we want to share with you how water permeates all domains of life.

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The water pump users

Who are the water users? The water users in Marofarihy basically comprise the whole village. In other words, everybody in Marofarihy fetches water from the pumps. Young, old, very old, disabled, women and men. If people are too old to fetch water they often receive help from other people, sometimes in return for a small fee. In other situations, we found that some people don’t have jerry cans or buckets and borrow them from others while fetching water for them in return. Men carry heavy jerry cans and sell their services as a source of income, children help their mothers. This means that a whole system of solidarity, obligation, trade and exchange has emerged around the pumps. But each pump has its unique story, history, rules, regulations and challenges. We were amazed by the self-regulatory practices and tools to maintain it that developed around the pumps. It appears that the more water users a pump has, the more institutionalized arrangements to regulate it were put in place.

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The construction of a Malagasy bush pump

Collaborating with a technical team, who have longstanding experience of installing hand pumps in very remote areas, has left us with a great sense of awe for their extremely challenging work. Imagine how the technology and the mechanics first travel all the way from the capital Antananarivo by “taxi brousse” to the village, before transporting everything to the bush. Usually the village leader mobilizes a group of young men, who are tasked with carrying the equipment (be it on bicycles, motor bikes or by cattle) through very rough terrain. Often, long distances need to be bridged by foot and men carry heavy bags of sand, women carry water before the mechanics can start with drilling the borehole. There is no guarantee that water will be found, or that all the equipment works. We have captured this fascinating journey, in which both technology and the ancestors – or people, place and matter – need to be willing to enrol themselves into this daunting undertaking.

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What does caring for water mean in Madagascar?

An important question for the maintenance of water pumps is how to get people to pay for the repairs without excluding the poorer members of society? It is important to keep in mind that no payment or maintenance schemes were imposed or suggested. During our consecutive visits and research, it appeared that the villagers were not only already paying for their water consumption, but they had put a system into place that would exempt the poorest members of society from paying membership fees. Whenever we asked about the motivation for peoples’ actions they would refer to the interrelated notions of adidy & fihavanana.

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The other side of the crystal

While preparing himself for the eternal journey, our deeply esteemed Malagasy grandfather Florent Rakotoson, whispered into our ears that he was ready to join his ancestors “de l’autre côté du cristal” – in the hereafter. Only after he passed away, a year before the finalization of this project, it dawned on us that he had given us the most beautiful and apt title for a project that deals with the provision of clean drinking water in Madagascar.

On the other side of the crystal refers both to the transparent substance of clean water, and to the idea that the hereafter (heaven) is like a mirror of the here (worldly). In other words, the place where the ancestors dwell is only separated from us by a permeable crystal. From there they can watch us, fallible earthly beings and correct us whenever we fail to honour their heritage, which is rooted in the Malagasy principle of fihavanana that keeps society together. In order to understand what caring for water means in Marofarihy village, we need to begin to appreciate that everything – living and dead, human and non-human, the past and the present – is intricately interwoven.

A few months after Florent made his passage to “the other side of the crystal”; his lovely wife Noeline unexpectedly joined him. This project is dedicated to this lovely couple, and to all our exemplary ancestors.

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Research findings and some notes on impact

The word ‘impact’ is omnipresent in the (social sciences) research landscape nowadays. However, we as social scientists know that impact might mean very different things to different people. We therefore have to bear in mind that – particularly when carrying out research in what we nowadays call the Global South – a lot of assumptions are built into our understanding of what we mean by impact, which are informed and shaped by our own institutions and values that we have come to hold dear.

Therefore, in the pursuit of showing that our research has impact, we as social scientists (and we are speaking as anthropologists) seem to be confronted with a paradox, because part of our intellectual aspiration is exactly to try to understand the manifold ways in which values about what constitutes ‘the good life’ are enacted and lived through differently by different people.

So instead of predetermining what we deem to be impactful from the outset, or making any claims to impact, we believe a wiser course is to tell you the story of a rural village in Madagascar through the eyes of those whom it seeks to represent. As such, we take this collaboration as an avenue to explore the relationship between anthropological research, knowledge exchange and the provision of potable water – as an iterative process – as impact. Crucially, we should always reflect on our own position and ask the question, whom does our knowledge stand to benefit?

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A video introduction to this website

This website consists out of six 'chapters', that you can browse in any order you like. In a short video we visually introduce you to all of them.

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