Loveland photographer works to bring clean water to African villages

When Loveland photographer Georgia Evans saw African women working hard for dirty water, she wanted to make their lives easier with a tool she uses on her photography trips.

Evans travels the backcountry with a water filter, something she wanted to take to Maasai African villagers, but the straw-sized devices weren’t enough for entire communities. With a little research she learned about community-sized, natural gravity water filters that do not require batteries, chemicals or electricity to clean large amounts of water — something already used in Kenya and other areas of Africa.

“As I researched the Maasai people and learned about the culture, I saw pictures of women and girls who had buckets on their heads and had to go miles to go to water sources,” said Evans, owner and graphic designer for Westwind Graphics and a freelance photographer for 25 years. “The water sources look like crap. … I thought, ‘Ick. They are drinking that.’ If they had water filters, they could have clean water.”

Evans, who originally planned to travel to Tanzania, Africa, in January 2016 to take safari wildlife photos, decided to turn her trip into a volunteer project. She made the journey with a travel group, which was invited to bring gifts like school supplies, but she wanted to bring something more. She brought 50 personal-sized water filters and two community-sized filtering systems to one of the Maasai villages in eastern Africa, raising $2,500 for the project.

“I just wanted to make a difference when I went to this place and not just go to be a tourist,” Evans said.

The trip to Maasai villages

In March 2019, Evans will repeat the trip but with more filters for the “Clean Water Filters for African Villagers Project — 2nd Village.” She launched a GoFundMe fundraiser with the goal to raise $4,000, enough for up to 100 individual filters and six community-sized filters.

The Maasai villagers, who live in round mud houses with thatched roofs, have no running water, plumbing or electricity. The girls and women spend a good portion of the day collecting water that they carry back to their villages in buckets on their heads, and they also cut trees and gather wood for cooking and boiling. The water filters will save them time from having to go to remote water sources.

“Two years ago, I realized there was a bigger need,” Evans said about the need for the large filters to serve the whole community, not just the individual filters villagers use when they go out to collect water, gather wood and herd cattle. “There are a lot of people in these villages, and this is a way to serve everybody in the village.”

Evans will return to Tanzania to the same general area as her first trip and stay for seven days, bringing volunteer help to be able to assemble and distribute more of the filters. She plans to find a couple of different villages, since the Maasai are pastoral and semi-nomadic and the original village she had visited during her first trip may have moved. She plans to bring two to three community-sized filtering systems to each village, so the number of villages she will be able to visit will depend on how much she raises, she said.

How the water filters work

The large filtering systems, which likely would be placed at schools and community centers, remove bacteria, viruses and protozoan parasites to help prevent waterborne illnesses and can filter 70,000 to 100,000 liters of water. They last about two years, because the filtering devices inside the systems wear down and need to be replaced, Evans said. She is researching how to replenish or replace the devices to provide a more permanent solution.

The filtering systems, which operate similar to a bilge pump, come from Swiss company Vestergaard, which is selling them to Evans at wholesale for her volunteer project. Water is poured through the top of the filtering system, a device in the middle filters out the contaminants, and another device on the bottom catches the cleaned water and distributes it through spouts. A red handle is pulled down on a weekly basis to clean out everything and push the dirt and debris into a bottle, which can be removed and dumped.

“It does something with pressure to clean out the filter and the dirt goes to the bottom,” Evans said.

The individual filters are from the same company and are called Vestergaard LifeStraws. Water is filtered directly by drinking out of the straw devices.

The first trip to deliver the filters

For her first trip, Evans had the filters shipped to her hotel in Tanzania and had to pay a bribe to the border guards. Her local trip guides, who help with the itinerary, loaded up the filters on Safari vehicles and headed into the Serengeti to meet members of the Maasai tribe at their hut village near the Ngorongoro Crater.

The Maasai chief brought Evans and the guides to the local school, which had walls covered in hand-painted décor and a chalkboard, with a teachers table and chickens roaming in and out of the building. The guides carried one of the filters into the school, and Evans assembled it. The other filter was brought to the center of their village for another demonstration.

“When I was trying to explain how I use it, the Maasai men thought it was something pumped over and over,” Evans said.

Evans spoke with the Maasai chief, who only knew a few words of English. She did not speak Maasai, and her local guides spoke Swahili and not Maasai, making communication difficult, she said. She wished she had brought a translator along, which she plans to do for the second trip, a Maasai chief, who has helped National Geographic better understand the Maasai culture.

“He wants to help his people, so he’s going to translate,” Evans said.

What the second trip will involve

The second clean water filters trip will involve three days for the deliveries, and Evans and the volunteers will stay in lodges. After the deliveries, they will go on a safari, staying at a tent camp in the Serengeti, and she will take photos of the wildlife in the Ngorongoro Crater. The crater is a 10-mile protected area and national park full of wildlife, requiring permits to enter — Evans has one for her photography work.

“It’s full of wildlife. When I say I can guarantee wildlife, I can guarantee wildlife. … This is nature just the way it is intended,” Evans said. “The native Maasai are allowed to live around the rim of it.”

Entering the crater and seeing the wildlife there is not something many people get the chance to do, Evans said.

“This is an incredible cultural experience. It’s not something tourists ever get to experience,” Evans said.

Evans, who has traveled to 16 countries, plans to do additional trips in Africa and Nepal, India, which both have villages lacking clean water. She’s been asked why she wants to continue the project, she said.

“I grew up with a lot of extended people in my life who I could tell took time out of their busy lives to help and support me,” Evans explained on her GoFundMe page. “These generous people were the best examples of giving back, and so for some time I have picked something where I can give back to the world, one village at a time.”

Evans considers photography her passion. With degrees in health and physical education, she taught and then went into graphic arts. She’s done event and brochure photographs, shoots for websites and works as a travel and wildlife photographer.

“I just love to capture life, real life, as it’s happening, photos of people and photos of wildlife,” Evans said.

Shelley Widhalm is a freelance writer and editor and founder of Shell’s Ink Services, a writing and editing service based in Loveland. She has more than 15 years of experience in communications and holds a master’s degree in English from Colorado State University. She can be reached at shellsinkservices.com or shellsinkservices@gmail.com.