[Trailer] Children of Mekong - Asia’s Water Woes from Logue on Vimeo.
Photojournalist Jean Loo spent a year putting together a project that documents the lives of people who have no access to clean water and sanitation. The result is a stunning multi-media exhibit that drives straight to the heart of the issue.
Showing at Objectifs Gallery from 19 November to 3 December, The Children of the Mekong exhibition uses photo-journalism as a tool to communicate the urgency of water and sanitation needs in Asia’s poorer communities.
It works. Jean’s touching and sympathetic portrayal of rural villagers living in Vietnam, Cambodia and China is served up with cold, hard facts about what it means to live without toilets and running water. Viewers walk away knowing that the lives documented in the exhibit may very well depend on finding solutions quickly.
Cold, hard facts
Unicef and the World Health Organization issued a joint report in 2009 entitled Diarhhoea: Why children are still dying and what can be done? The statistics revealed in the report are startling: 2.5 billion people lack adequate sanitation and nearly 1 billion lack safe drinking water. One in four people in developing countries practice open defecation. These circumstances combine to cause a devastating consequence: for want of basic facilities, 1.5 million children die each year due to diarrhoea.
In December 2009, Jean decided to familiarize herself, and subsequently the rest of us, with some of the faces and personalities behind these appalling statistics. She recruited Cheow Xin Yi, a journalist with the TODAY newspaper and Yang Huiwen, a Shanghai-based business journalist working for a global financial news agency, to accompany her.
Their goal was to find stories and people that inspired dialogue and change that would impact Asia’s water and sanitation crisis. They found one such a story in Xishuangbanna, China.
“While working on Toiling for Toilets, the farmer I interviewed - Jie San - really touched my heart. He took upon himself the responsibility of providing his family with a modern toilet because he was aware of the ills of improper sanitation. Imagine living in a village of 34 households and only four have a toilet while the rest of the families are accustomed to defecating in their own backyard… His desire to want to improve his family’s living conditions is commendable.. and I hope through this project we will be able to share his story and inspire people to create the changes they want to in their own environments.”
The trio spent a week each in a floating community in Cambodia, rice fields in Vietnam and mountain villages in China. Each location was the site of a current project of the organization Lien Aid, which helps these rural communities benefit from clean water and sanitation.
Lien Aid is the Singapore-based non-governmental organization that commissioned and supported The Children of the Mekong. The organization seeks to build a firm foundation for human development by making safe water and sanitation accessible and affordable to poor communities in Asia.
Wishful water treatments
Eight-year-old Non Siew May lives in one of those communities. She is one of 8,000 villagers who live in the floating village of Kampong Chhnang outside of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Their dwellings are small, rickety houseboats with no running water and no toilets.
Siew May has been sick often and severely for much of her life because her family scoops their water from the river outside their front door and treats it with alum, an industrial crystal chemical compound, before drinking it. While alum certainly makes the water clearer, it has no effect on the micro-organisms that populate the river.
When Siew May and the other children defecate, they go out the back door to a tiny shed with a hole leading straight into the same river. She’s too young to understand that it’s the same water she drinks, but her grandmother has to delude herself into thinking she can make it safe with a magic powder. She has no choice.
Simple solutions
Nowadays, Siew May’s family can buy safe water from a community-owned floating filtration system introduced by Lien Aid. For the equivalent of US$0.17, villagers can purchase a 20 litres bottle of water that has been sucked up from the river and purified with ultraviolet radiation. The system works well unless the water delivery is late and the alum is used again.
Lien Aid works in close partnership with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University along with several other NGOs, research organizations and government agencies to find the best available solutions. They are always seeking ideas and new technologies for social enterprises that can transform the quality of life for their target villages.
Projects like Jean’s are vital to spreading the message about the need for life-saving sanitation and clean water options in Asia’s least developed rural communities. She reintroduces the human aspect into humanity’s development goals.
When asked by Eco-Business what message she’d like readers to take away, Jean responded, “I think much has been written about water and sanitation in Asia, but I hope for these very personal people-focussed stories to inspire readers in their own way, be it for them to continue their efforts in sustainable development, in the green arena or whichever industry.
“I do hope that businesses with a keen interest in water-sanitation issues especially will come forward to find out more and bring together their expertise in helping to improve life in rural Asia.”
Details of The Children of Mekong
Where: Objectifs Gallery, 2nd floor, 56A Arab Street
When: Till Dec 3, Mondays to Fridays, 11am to 7pm; Saturdays by appointment
Admission: Free
Info: Call 6293-9782 or go to the Children of Mekong site.
Jean Qingwen Loo is an award-winning documentary photographer with a keen interest in social issues in Asia. She has exhibited at seven group shows and represented Singapore as a photojournalist at the ASEAN Youth Camp. Her works were exhibited during the 2009 Month of Photography Asia’s Out of Focus show. Jean also co-authored and photographed “Changing Phases”, a book on children growing up in modern Southeast Asia.
