In Oil-rich Angola, Cholera Preys upon Poorest

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LUANDA, Angola, June 10 — In a nation whose multibillion-dollar oil boom should arguably make its people rich enough to drink Evian, the water that many in this capital depend on goes by a less fancy name: Bengo.

The Bengo River passes north of here, its waters dark with grit, its banks strewn with garbage.

Two dozen roaring pumping stations suck in 1.3 million gallons from the river each day, filling 450 tanker trucks that in turn supply 10,000 vendors across Luanda's endless slums. The vendors then fill the jerry cans and washtubs of the city's slum dwellers, who buy the water to drink and bathe in.

This is one reason, health experts here say, that Luanda's slums are now the center of one of the worst cholera epidemics to strike Africa in nearly a decade, an outbreak that has sickened 43,000 Angolans and killed more than 1,600 since it began in February.

But it is only one reason. Cholera typically spreads through contact with contaminated water or sewage, and in Luanda's slums, both are everywhere. Neighborhoods here are ringed by mountains of garbage, often soaked by rivulets of human waste. Only about half of slum dwellers have even an outdoor latrine.

Children stripped to their underwear dance through sewage-clogged creeks and slide down garbage dumps on sleds made of sheet metal into excrement-fouled puddles.

Much of the city has no drainage system; in heavy rains, the filthy water rises hip-high in some of the poorest dwellings.

One development group estimated that it would take 22,000 dump trucks to clear away the trash. That was in 1994, when Luanda had half the population of 4.5 million it has now.

"I have never seen anything like it," said David Weatherill, a water and sanitation expert for Doctors Without Borders, which is leading the response to the epidemic. "You see conditions like this on a smaller scale. But I have never seen it on such a huge scale. It is quite shocking."

Angola is in the midst of a gusher in oil revenue, its hotels crammed with oil executives and its harbor filled with tankers carrying away the 1.4 million barrels of crude pumped here each day. The economy grew by 18 percent last year. The government racked up a budget surplus of more than $2 billion.

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Only one in six Luandan households is lucky enough to have running water, and for many of them, it comes from a community standpipe, according to Development Workshop, a nonprofit group in Angola. The often-contaminated river water from trucks that roam the slums costs up to 12 cents a gallon — a hefty sum in a nation where two-thirds of the people live on less than $2 a day, and up to 160 times the price paid in better-off neighborhoods with piped water.

So the poor ration their water use, limiting themselves to about two gallons a day per person for drinking, bathing, washing clothes and cleaning. That is far below the five-gallon daily minimum recommended by the United Nations — and one twenty-sixth the average use in Western countries, according to Doctors Without Borders.

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It first hit Boa Vista, a shantytown minutes from downtown. Ombrina Cabanga, a 20-year-old mother of a 2-year-old girl, did everything to protect herself, said her sister-in-law, Oriana Gabriel. She washed vegetables, rinsed plates and cleaned the latrine the family shares with three others. As the Health Ministry recommended, she used bleach to disinfect the drinking water she bought from the neighborhood vendor.

But her house is a few feet from a giant trash-filled gulley. Her latrine, like everyone else's, drains directly into it. And she sold soap every day in the city's famously squalid outdoor market, a job she hoped to escape by taking adult literacy classes.

One Tuesday in late March, she came home and vomited into a bucket. Two nights later, she was dead.

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The cholera epidemic is now waning, having run what epidemiologists call its natural, devastating course. But without an improvement in slum conditions, said Mr. Weatherill, the group's water and sanitation expert, the respite may last only until the next rainy season.

"Unless things change, we probably will be back the next year," he said in a telephone interview, "and the year after that."