Turkey, Sanitary Engineering, 1973/1974

This article is the short and real life story of an engineer who has utterly devoted his life to water. Who has been trying to help people by ensuring much cleaner and clearer waters during his whole life. Who has been the witness of the lack of water. And although our hero has tried to manage and control water, he wishes this article to flow naturally.

Vahap Balman was born in 1947 in a small town in the eastern part of Turkey. There was no electricity, no drinking water and no sewerage system in those days.

The people took their drinking water from simple and shallow wells, which were only 3-4 meters away from very primitive toilets. Waste water was partly discharged into lagoons and partly disgorged into streets and open areas very close to the houses. The primitive toilets next to the houses were emptied only once a year, and decayed excrement was being used to supply the fertilizer needs for fields and gardens.

As it was no different in his primary school, our hero had believed that the drinking water and sewerage systems were the same all around the world. It was understandable that he had dysentery caused by drinking water containing tadpoles, amoebas, giardias and various bacteria. He never used medicine, and waited for the symptoms to pass naturally. Although he was competently aware of how to put an animal out to pasture, he had no idea about water pollution; nor did the other people in the town.

A drinking water system appeared in some parts of the town just when he started secondary school. He was incredibly happy to see water flowing from taps. When he talked about it at home, his grandmother described flowing water as a lovely song.

Most of the people in the town were engaged in agricultural activities. They were growing their own vegetables and fruits. However, the hardest aspect of agriculture was that there had never been enough irrigation water as long as our hero knew. Since irrigation water was supplied by simple systems developed 400-500 years earlier, it was impossible to have sufficient water. Although there were plenty of water resources around the town, people had not developed them. To describe this attitude there was a saying: “Water flows, Turk just looks” People of that period preferred to maintain these traditional water systems that they had inherited from their parents by repairing them every year instead of using new technologies.

The life of people was simple, since they did not have many things to share. Belongings and needs were limited; but people were happy, because they thought that people all around the world were living like themselves. There was no communication media yet such as television and radio. Even so, there was unjust utilisation of water by the powerful families over the poorer, and there were many conflicts related to this.

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