Photography: Water

Kroo Bay, Freetown, Sierra Leonie, 2012 Momoh, 33, collects plastic bottles from the polluted beach of Kroo Bay, a poor slum settlement of 5,500 people in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It’s 2012, and Sierra Leone is suffering through one of its worst outbreaks of cholera. The outbreak strikes hardest in the slums, where crowded and unsanitary living conditions and unsafe water sources allow the disease to spread rapidly through densely-populated areas. A waterborne disease that infects the intestine and is transmitted through contaminated water and food, cholera has ravaged 12 of the country’s 13 districts. The World Health Organization has reported 18,919 cases with 273 deaths since the beginning of 2012. International aid organisations have pressed for continued efforts to stabilise the spread, while Sierra Leone’s government has declared a national emergency. Momoh supports his family of three by collecting bottles from the rubbish along the waterways and filling them with chemicals from photographic studios for sale as a balm for skin irritations and skin lightening. As one of the world’s poorest countries, Sierra Leone has high unemployment levels for men.

Grey Bush, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2012 A man collects water from the polluted river running through the Grey Bush slum of Freetown. The sources for water are limited, and while international aid organisations have created temporary solutions in standpipes, the issue of sanitation and water has yet to be resolved.

Dumpsite, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2012 The main dumpsite in the centre of Freetown where garbage and human waste accumulates. While the cholera outbreak had receded by the end of the year, the danger for another remains. The core of the problem lies in an infrastructure unable to cope with a large urban population. Until the issues of water and sanitation are seriously addressed by the new government, the poorest of the world’s poor will remain vulnerable to nineteenth-century diseases like cholera. The danger of these dumpsites and their ability to spread fatal diseases is described by Fatima Bangura, 58, and her husband Mohammad Kamara, 74. They lost their eldest son to cholera in July 2012, a month after the disease saw a resurgence. He contracted it in the morning and died the same day. Their home sits beneath a trash dumpsite that, during the rainy season, floods homes with garbage and human waste. “He was feeling sick in the morning”, Bangura says of that Sunday in July. “They gave him some treatment [at the community centre] and [we] went home. We buried him the same day.”

Sangam, Allahabad, India, 2013 Girls from the K Gandhi School in Farrukhabad arrive at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in the holy city of Allahabad, India. The city was the site of the Kumbh Mela religious gathering that saw over 30 million people congregate at the banks of these two rivers in March 2013 to bathe and pray. The aftermath of hosting such a large event left the land around the sangam, or meeting point, replete with waste.