2. The Water Cooler
On the edge of the Sahel keeping water cool is an everyday problem. When Goudoubo refugee camp was established in 2012, the supply of a physical infrastructure for the provision of drinking water was one of the first steps in its construction. In 2017, water was supplied across the camp from two diesel generators connecting taps and hand-pumps to ensure a continued supply for the camp’s 7,576 inhabitants. But using UNHCR’s recommended daily minimum of 15 litres of water per day means addressing not just the supply of clean water but also its refrigeration.13
On any given day UNHCR’s ubiquitous, standard issue 10-litre plastic water containers can be found in and around Goudoubo. Empty yellow and white containers are lined up at water collection points, waiting to be filled. Full containers can be seen in transit, hauled through the camp by hand or on makeshift wheelbarrows. Meanwhile, just as the inhabitants must travel beyond the camp’s boundaries every day to gather firewood, the residents of villages in the vicinity frequently travel into it to access one of the closest, reliable sources of pumped water. Donkey-drawn carts loaded with empty containers pull up at one of the boreholes or taps, stocking up with supplies.
Yet the Tuareg and Fulani people living in and around Goudoubo rarely directly drink the water that comes out of these plastic containers. This is because they think the piped water is too hot to drink. The camp’s water distribution system does not keep water at a low enough temperature for it to be pleasant to drink.
The use of these technologies for water storage and cooling have much to tell us about people’s minimal requirements for living, as well as their energy demands.
The refugee communities in Goudoubo have several technologies to cool or refrigerate their water, and to turn piped water into water that is acceptable to drink. These range from clay pots and goatskin water bags, to insulated plastic bottles and iceboxes. To date, few if any of these devices, however, have appeared in the audits of energy technologies undertaken in these camps. Yet the use of these technologies for water storage and cooling have much to tell us about people’s minimal requirements for living, as well as their energy demands.
The refrigeration trade
On food distribution days, when the camp is at its busiest, people arrive from the towns of Dori and Deou to sell cold drinks out of plastic cool boxes. Many of these vendors are women. Some come with cool boxes filled with plastic bottles of Coke, Sprite and Fanta, and sachets of cold water, alongside other mass-produced goods. Others come with cool boxes filled with locally made produce: bottles of milk, ginger, bissap (a hibiscus-based drink) and degue (a drink made from yoghurt and millet couscous). In town, some traders refrigerate their wares and produce their own ice in fridge-freezers powered by the local electricity grid or, during blackouts, by diesel generators. Other traders, mostly refugees, lack any refrigeration equipment and buy bags of ice in town to cool the goods that they sell in the camp, usually adding a 50 per cent mark-up on the town price.
For Burkinabe traders – people native to northern Burkina Faso – access to the camp often hinges on personal contacts; for example, a brother-in-law who is a local gendarme. Not all of these traders are native to this part of Burkina Faso. Some of them are also refugees, people forcibly displaced by conflict and insecurity in Mali. Some of them lived for a time in the camp, and may still have relatives there. Invariably, refugees who have been able to establish themselves as entrepreneurs in this niche market for refrigerated drinks are those who owned electrical appliances and generating equipment in Mali and brought it with them.
In the morning the cool boxes of these vendors are full. When they return home in the afternoon they expect them to be empty. In the interim, they have to keep them cold and they cover the ice inside with layers of plastic, cardboard and fabric. One of the most prominent cold-drink sellers in Goudoubo was a Tuareg woman from the province of Gao whose family was able to bring a fridge-freezer and a diesel generator by truck when it left Mali. Like other vendors, on distribution day she strategically places herself at key food-distribution points around the camp. Taking their positions, the vendors lay their cool boxes on the ground and sell their wares to people wanting to take relief from the hot weather and the busy camp activities.
The number of cool-drink vendors in Goudoubo is widely thought to have increased, with a regular flow of women from Dori. Some work to establish a loyal clientele in the camp by offering cold water from the bottom of the cool box, ice cubes and credit to their regular customers. As one saleswoman explained: ‘You know if refugees regularly come to buy drinks at your selling place they won’t go and buy things from a new seller. They’ll stay faithful to you.’
The sale of cold drinks has also created income-generating opportunities for the camp’s children, some of whom have inserted themselves into the market as waiters, collecting orders from customers and collecting their payments for a fee (around CFA 250 or $0.46 per day).
Some camp households have acquired cool boxes for domestic use, but without a regular supply of ice to go in them, these lose their utility and people rely on other, more locally made devices – from earthenware pots to insulated plastic bottles and goatskin sacks – to cool water for drinking.
Plastic cooling
The cheapest and most commonly used solution to the challenge of refrigerating water in and around Goudoubo involves the construction of what engineers and designers call ‘evaporative cooling technologies’. These may vary in terms of materials but operate in a similar way. Water is poured over outer layers and slowly heats up and evaporates, keeping inner contents at a lower temperature – much as sweat cools the human body. These technologies can be made entirely from organic materials – such as animal skin and leather – or by combining plastics, cardboard and cloth. They can be used to cool water as well as other fluids, like milk and juice.
Evaporative cooling technologies are not unique to this part of the Sahel or to communities of Malian, Somali, Sudanese or Congolese refugees. Similar devices can be found across sub-Saharan Africa, from Burkina Faso to Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and beyond. Studies show that, when used in areas with hot climatic conditions and low humidity, such low-cost devices can achieve temperatures of 20–25°C, with potential for the storage of biomedical supplies like insulin.14 Yet, while evaporative cooling devices are an important part of Africa’s indigenous technological heritage, they have thus far been entirely overlooked by humanitarian interventions in energy. Within the context of humanitarian assistance and programmes of energy access for displaced people, such micro-technologies of heat and refrigeration often go unnoticed.
Plastic water containers are used for general storage purposes, and to collect water from taps and standpipes and transport it to homes. People use water directly from the container for bathing, cleaning, washing up and the preparation of cooked food. But, when it comes to drinking it, the water is invariably transferred to another vessel capable of cooling it. One of the most prized water-cooling devices used inside Goudoubo camp is the earthenware pot (sometimes referred to in French as a canari). Made from clay mixed with cattle dung, these can be manufactured in and around Goudoubo camp. In homes, they are commonly placed atop a plate on the ground, with the area around it kept damp throughout the day. Such pots are usually household purchases, however, and must be procured from skilled potters.
Less celebrated but more ubiquitous and long-lasting is the homemade or upcycled cooler, made by wrapping plastic water containers in layers of insulating fabric. These homemade evaporative devices can be found throughout Goudoubo: on a mat or blanket in the shade of people’s homes or on the move, slung beneath a donkey cart or around a shoulder.
Five-litre jerrycans of Indonesian palm oil (fortified with vitamin A and D) distributed to refugees by the World Food Programme are commonly found inside people’s homes in Goudoubo, upcycled into bespoke cooling devices.
People requisition a variety of containers to this end. These include the 10-litre plastic water containers that are distributed by humanitarian agencies as well as the five-litre containers that are brought into the camp alongside other mass-produced goods by shopkeepers and traders from Dori. People also repurpose receptacles once used to carry other substances, like cooking oil. For example, five-litre jerrycans of Indonesian palm oil (fortified with vitamin A and D) distributed to refugees by the World Food Programme are commonly found inside people’s homes in Goudoubo, upcycled into bespoke cooling devices.
These homemade water coolers are often elaborate and highly personalized. For example, a four-litre water bottle, may be wrapped in two layers of fabric – first felt, then old cloth – before being rolled in tarpaulin and stitched together.
These homemade water coolers are ad hoc innovations, defined by the repurposing of extant objects and available raw materials. People employ several tactical and localized approaches to their immediate material circumstances, responding to the ways in which the centralized distribution of goods and services, like water, is deemed unable to meet their needs by reworking objects and artefacts (including those distributed by NGOs) around other priorities and needs.
A cooler goatskin
The homemade plastic cooler is widely held to be an adequate or functional device. But the most highly regarded evaporative cooling device is the goatskin bag that can be carried over the shoulder. In northern Burkina Faso and southern Mali, goatskin bags – called Soumaley in Fulani, Agadoud in Tamasheq and Guerba in Arabic15 – used to carry water are prized objects. Goatskin bags are most closely associated with the material culture and traditions of the Tuareg people, and are also valued by the Fulani and Bella peoples. ‘When you open it, the water tastes like it has come from a fridge’, said a Fulani man from a village neighbouring Goudoubo. ‘These things cool water so fast, it can become too cool: like ice!’
In Goudoubo goatskin water vessels can be found strung up on wooden sticks just inside homes or in the shade under carts. They are widely held to be better at keeping water cool than either plastic jerrycans or clay pots. ‘The water you drink from one of these is cooler than the water you drink from any pot,’ said one Tuareg man in Goudoubo. ‘If you have one of these and put it in your home, you’ll never drink water from anything else again.’
With the cool water that flows from these devices comes memories of the lives that people once lived. Goatskin water coolers were a common feature of everyday life in Mali for many of the Tuareg and Fulani people now living in Goudoubo; for some they had once been their family’s primary means of storing and cooling water. As some people describe it, life before the camp was life lived without plastic jerrycans, and goatskin water containers were one of the few larger, personal items that people carried with them when they fled or left Mali in the early 2010s.
The taste of water from a goatskin bag evokes the sense and feeling of lives left behind. One Tamasheq-speaking Tuareg woman in Goudoubo said:
I once lived in Gao, at the edge of the waterhole of N’Tillit. The weather was colder than here. There were trees and there was shade. We used these goatskins to quench our thirst and to cool our water. But here in the camp, it’s the desert. There are no trees. There is no shade, we have plastic containers and they can store our water but they cannot keep it cool. The water that comes out of the taps here is too hot. So we have to keep using these goatskins to keep our water cool.
In Goudoubo goatskin coolers are important vessels of cultural heritage and tradition. People’s investments in these – their interest in making or acquiring them, as well as discussion of their unique properties – is motivated by their connections to the past as much as by their function or utility. In a context in which people live without access to mains electricity, the benefits of these locally made technologies are often weighed explicitly against modern, electrical appliances. One young man explained:
When water comes from a fridge you can’t drink it directly, you can’t drink it in one-shot, you have to stop because it’s too cold and uncomfortable. If you begin drinking from a Soumaley, though, you can keep drinking it. When you drink from a Soumaley the water tastes better, cold and pleasant. You will prefer it to a fridge.
The Tuareg and Fulani people from the Gao region in southeastern Mali who are now housed in Goudoubo once used these leather vessels to store milk from cows and goats, as well as curd, porridge and water. Different animal skins have diverse qualities, determining how people used them and for what purpose. Sheepskin, for example, is seen as more flexible than goatskin. People prefer it as a container for porridge, milk and curd, which need to be regularly shaken and skimmed. By contrast, people prefer to use harder, more resistant goatskin for water.
Not everybody romanticizes the goatskin bag in this way. For some, it is a reminder of hardship and a lack of basic infrastructure. For some people, life in the camp makes everyday access to drinking water significantly easier than it was in the homes they left and reduces their appetite for a labour-intensive leather-manufacturing process. For one young Tuareg couple, respectively employed in the camp’s school canteen and as the school’s watchman, the goatskin bag carried strong association of work and labour. ‘We only used the goatskin bag because we didn’t have water’, the wife explained. ‘Now, the tap is just right here, and you can buy pots in the market to keep your water in.’ Her husband added: ‘People don’t need to make goatskin water bags anymore when water is always available, close by, next to the place you live.’
The transformation of goatskin into water vessels involves a gendered division of labour that has been well documented.16 Men kill the goat, cut the skin from the throat to the chest and hang the carcass, before removing the hooves and skin. Only particular goatskin is good enough to be turned into a water carrier. Even in a refugee camp context the age and sex of a goat remains important. Though they are more difficult to come by, people in Goudoubo prefer mature female animals, whose reproductive life has stretched their skin, providing water carriers with a volume of up to 40 litres.
The transformation of goatskin into water vessels involves a gendered division of labour that has been well documented.
Women treat the skin and tan it, soaking it in water with a mixture of ash and ground seed pods (bagaruwa or gabaruwa in Hausa and Gaodey in Fulani). The skins are soaked for several days before they are dried and sewn together with a leather thread. The legs are tied together so that the skin can be hung in the shade and a small hole is left in the throat that can be pulled open or closed each time it is filled with water.
Depending on the intended contents, different manufacturing techniques and leather treatments are required. Liquids like milk are considered to be ‘thin’ or ‘transparent’, allowing any animal residue to be quickly skimmed off before drinking. The goatskins that are used to make water or milk carriers are often not turned inside out. ‘Thicker’ liquids like curd and porridge are seen as more difficult to filter and demand a cleaner carrier, and skins are turned inside out after being treated.
It takes a minimum of two weeks to make a Soumaley. A plastic jerrycan bought in Dori can be used as soon as it is purchased but, despite the time it takes to produce, the goatskin vessels are widely considered to be better technologies and more efficient water coolers. While plastic canisters are widely seen to cool less with age, the animal skins are understood to cool more as they become old. They can last for up to three years but require care and maintenance. Before they can be used a dry and rigid skin must be carefully wetted, to prevent it breaking as it fills with water. If the skin is damaged or pierced it can be repaired. A little cooked rice applied onto the surface of the skin works as an adhesive, and a new square of leather can be stuck on top and stitched in place. One of the risks is the camp water itself. For some refugees in Goudoubo, the pumped water in the camp is so hot that it risks damaging these highly regarded devices.
The leather water cooler is also associated with cleanliness and hygiene. In contrast to water stored in an open, earthenware pot, it is seen to reduce potential risks from waterborne disease by preventing children from touching the water with dirty hands.
In Goudoubo leather water vessels are desirable objects and the people who make them are acutely aware of their value on the market or as objects to exchange. During 2016, for example, one skilled craftswoman made two goatskin water coolers that she bartered for other goods, exchanging one for a hijab and one for a blanket.
Such examples of local leather production are increasingly rare within Goudoubo, however, for many of the camp’s inhabitants goats are more valuable alive than dead. Each week, refugees can be found at the nearby cattle market of Seydou, exchanging goats for cash to buy rice, oil and other basic provisions. At a time of scarcity, leather is a relative luxury and the raw materials for a goatskin water cooler are less widely available.
Beyond cooling
As the following chapters show, these simple homemade coolers connect water storage and refrigeration to other kinds of energy object. People transport plastic water carriers filled with water around the camp in wheelbarrows that have been upcycled from old or unused solar cookers (see Chapter 4) and these same wheelbarrows are also used to carry gas canisters into and around the camp (see Chapter 7).
13 See UNHCR Emergency water standards, https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/93422/emergency-water-standard.
14 On the energy efficiency of water-cooling technologies, see Gill, G., Price, C., English, P. and Eriksson-Lee, J. (2002), ‘Traditional clay pots as storage containers for insulin in hot climates’, Tropical doctor, 32(4), pp. 237–238; Ogle, G. D., Abdullah, M., Mason, D., Januszewski, A. S. and Besançon, S. (2016), ‘Insulin storage in hot climates without refrigeration: temperature reduction efficacy of clay pots and other techniques’, Diabetic Medicine, 33(11), pp. 1544–1553.
15 Smith, A. B. (2005), African Herders: Emergence of Pastoral Traditions, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
16 For anthropological descriptions of the gendered division of tanning practices in West Africa, see Hill, P. (1972), Rural Hausa: a village and a setting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.