Lasting solution to Amity Hall's water woes

Louis Marriott, Gleaner Writer

TEN YEARS ago, young Carlton Gooden reflected on life in Amity Hall. Some five kilometres from Kensington, where Sam Sharpe torched the great house in 1831, Amity Hall is a remote village, home to a few hundred people enjoying a simple life of peace and good-neighbourliness.

Gooden, a thriving mason, cherished the lifestyle but was dissatisfied with aspects of the environment. The access roads were narrow, bumpy, and pockmarked with potholes. Electricity extended only to part of the village. There were no telephone lines, although some residents had cellular phones.

But the bee in Gooden's bonnet was the lack of piped water. Amity Hall residents were obliged to carry the vital fluid in containers on their heads. Water sources were polluted by bathing, laundering, domestic sanitation, and even car-washing. Some contracted water-borne diseases, and local fish had a short lifespan. In times of drought, the village's breadwinning farmers suffered losses. Work and school attendance declined as bathing became a challenge.

Gooden visualised a community solution to the problem requiring community support. He shared his vision with Sherman Thomas, who enjoyed great respect and credibility in the village. He persuaded Thomas that they could "trap a water" on a nearby hill and gravity-feed it into Amity Hall.

Thomas formed an Amity Hall development committee. The committee consulted Amity Hall's golden agers, who identified Bryson Spring, unceasingly flowing a kilometre away on a hill overlooking the village, as the ideal source of piped water.

Scepticism amid support

There was some scepticism among the general citizenry, but there was enough support to make a start. So the believers - men, women and children - on weekend workdays climbed up a steep and sometimes treacherous slope, across two streams bridged by boulders, carrying loads of sand, gravel, steel, and cement to Bryson Spring, where mason Gooden led the team that built a tomb over the spring and diverted water into rusty 20-year-old two-inch galvanised iron pipes scavenged from a previous neighbouring project.

The resources of the cooperating residents, who, with contacts of their parish councillor, Horace Lawrence, donated the materials for the project, were not enough to carry the water all the way. The suppliers carried the pipeline as far as their resources allowed, installed a standpipe, and invited the non-believers up the hill for a demonstration. The resistance ended immediately. The pipeline fed water into a large tank, also scavenged from the earlier project, where it was chlorinated and then delivered at phenomenal pressure through a standpipe in each of the community's 75 yards.

As for the genius, Carlton Gooden, he ran pipes through the kitchen and bathroom of his house.

In 2004, the Social Development Commission's St James parish officers urged the committee to enter the project for the Michael Manley Award for Community Self-Reliance. When the judges for the award paid their site a visit, they trudged up the steep kilometre to the tomb over Bryson Spring, a couple of senior citizens among them helped by able-bodied young men of Amity Hall. As the judges tasted the water, their consensus was that it was too deliciously refreshing to not be sold on the spring-water market.

Awards and grants

When the video documentary of short-listed projects was screened minutes before the awards presentation at the Little Theatre on Emancipation Day 2004, audience response was electric as images appeared of 'Miss Patsy' - an Amity Hall housewife who contributed significantly to the implementation of the project, now filling a container of water in her yard - and small children joyously drinking from a standpipe and dancing around it.

It was no contest. Amity Hall Water Supply won not only the fifth annual Michael Manley Award for Community Self-Reliance - a $200,000 cash prize and a beautiful bronze resin trophy sculpted by Kay Sullivan - but also the inaugural Environmental Foundation of Jamaica Award of $100,000 for the project with best credentials in environmental conservation.

Soon after, the St James Parish Council made a grant of $150,000 as its contribution to the purchase of new PVC mains to replace the rusty old galvanised iron pipes. Its health department provided technical support, including training in the proper chlorination of the water.

Along came Hurricane Ivan to test the system, followed by a drought, and then hurricanes Dennis and Emily. On all such occasions, when almost everywhere in Jamaica residents was discommoded by dirty brown water in rivers and taps, the deserving people of Amity Hall continued enjoying an uninterrupted supply of clean, pellucid water at $100 per month per household.

The economic recession has made subscriptions problematic for the growing community, but the committee soldiers on and has diversified its activities with road-patching and drain-cleaning on alternate weekends.