Water and spirit: theology in the time of cholera.

de Gruchy, Steve

This paper was born out of reflection on the deaths of 4,000 people from cholera in Zimbabwe at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009. Cholera is a preventable disease, easily avoided and simply treated. Yet, not far away from us, in a country that has been freed from colonial bondage, a tragedy was played out in the lives of those for whom liberation was intended. This narrative of tears brings together issues of political governance, public health, ecological collapse and the lives and livelihoods of the poor. It provides, in other words, an agenda for theological work. Because of the particular way in which this disease confronts us, theology in the time of cholera draws us to reflect again upon the relationship between spirit and water.

We are reminded of Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus recorded in the third chapter of John's gospel, where Jesus told Nicodemus that no one could see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit." (John 3:4, 5) (2)

Being born, and being born from above; being born of both water and Spirit. Such talk lies at the heart of Christian faith, and yet in the light of cholera is a much more complicated relationship than at first appears. Before we can enter into such reflection, we need to remind ourselves about the story of cholera.

Water and Spirit: The Story of Cholera

The city of London in the post-Napoleonic era (1820-40) was the largest place of human habitation anywhere on earth. Two and a half million people were crammed into a 50-kilometre circumference. The novels of Charles Dickens introduce us to the kind of life it was for the Victorian underclass, in which 100,000 people were "employed" as scavengers collecting the garbage, carcasses of the dead, dog shit and human sewage. These scavengers were not just removing it, but were recycling it--finding ways it could be sold up the value-added chain. Dog shit, for example, was used to rid leather of the lime that had removed the animal hair. And human shit provided a steady source of nitrogen for the farms supplying the city. Stephen Johnson paints the following picture:

   City landlords hired the men to remove the "night soil" from the
   overflowing cesspools of their buildings. The collecting of human
   excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were
   called "rakers" and "gong-fermors", and they played an
   indispensable role in the waste-recycling system that helped London
   grow into a true metropolis, selling the waste to farmers outside
   the city walls. (3)

As London expanded, assisted both by the agricultural revolution and by the fact that the city was geographically isolated from any enemies, so it became more and more expensive to move the excrement to the edges of the city. And so, from the mid-19th century on, it became cheaper and more expedient just to let the waste accumulate in vast cesspools. Johnson quotes an engineer's report from the 1840s:

   I found the whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of
   nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for
   years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools. Upon
   passing through the passage of the first house I found the yard
   covered in nightsoil, from the overflowing of the privy to the
   depth of nearly six inches. (4)

To this noxious mix was added the benefits of water-borne sewage, owing to the invention of the "water closet"--the WC, or toilet. Water-closet installation increased ten-fold between 1824 and 1844. The problem was, however, that there was no sewer system. "Without a functioning sewer system to connect to, most WC's simply flushed their contents into existing cesspools, greatly increasing their tendency to overflow". (5) London was sinking in its own shit. This was the perfect place for cholera to incubate.

   Cholera is an infectious gastroenteritis produced by a bacterium,
   Vibro cholerae. Transmission to humans occurs through eating food
   or drinking water contaminated with cholera vibrios from other
   cholera patients ... The bacteria produces a toxin which attacks
   the lining of the small intestine causing exhaustive diarrhea. In
   its most severe forms, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal
   illnesses known, and a healthy person's blood pressure may drop to
   hypotensive levels within an hour of the onset of symptoms;
   infected patients may die within three hours if medical treatment
   is not provided. In a common scenario, the disease progresses from
   the first liquid stool to shock in 4 to 12 hours, with death
   following in 18 hours to several days, unless oral rehydration
   therapy is provided. (6)

Cholera originates in the Ganges river valley in India. For centuries it was prevented by both geographic and climatic reasons from leaving the sub-continent. Yet, as the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 led to the expansion of the British empire, so cholera was exported from India alongside tea and spices. It arrived in the emerging dries of the world with a vengeance. Medical historians speak of seven great cholera pandemics from 1816 to 1994, in which millions of people in India, China, Indonesia, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Mexico, Korea, Arabia, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, the Ottoman Empire and South America died. Millions.

By 1854, cholera had visited Britain a number of times, arriving back on the ships of the mighty British navy.

   A creature that comes to life in the warmth of the human gut, the
   cholera bacterium thrives in hot, humid environments. Away from its
   home in India, it advanced in the summer and hid in the winter.
   During the summer of 1831, the pathogen took control of the ports
   of continental Europe. Britain's vast armada of merchant ships
   flowed steadily into and out of those contaminated harbours. Each
   new load of returning cargo threatened to bring death to England.
   (7)

The toxic mix of London's cesspools and the bacteria were a necessary but not sufficient cause for death. What was just as important was the state of public health at the time. The unquestioned orthodoxy of the day was that all disease was caused by air pollution; the notion that water would carry bacteria was a ridiculous idea. The 457-page report of 1842, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, drawn up by Edwin Chadwick, politician and secretary of the Poor Law Commission--a report that was very honest about the awful living conditions of the poor--argued that the diseases they faced were spread by "atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances". (8) This view stood in the classical Greek and medieval tradition of the miasmic theory of disease. Drawing from the Greek, miasma meaning pollution, it held that vapour or mist filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) was poisonous and carried the cause of diseases such as cholera and the Black Death. Miasma was identified by its smell; given that London was sitting on more than 300,000 decaying cesspools, it seemed a pretty obvious prognosis!

The miasma theory of the transmission of disease led easily to the idea that water could be used to wash away the impurities. Chadwick drew notables such as Disraeli, Dickens, Florence Nightingale and the editors of The Lancet to his side as he reconfigured the sewers of London, convinced parliament to create the General Board of Health in 1848 and sought to rid London of disease by washing the miasmata downstream into the Thames. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

   ... between the spring of 1848 and the summer of 1849, the flow of
   sewage into the Thames doubled. Chadwick's "improvements" had some
   unintended consequences. The first cholera epidemic killed one of
   every twenty-seven Londoners in a two-year period. The second would
   kill one of sixteen. (9)

That percentage translates to a quarter of a million people who died in London alone because of a misconception about the spread of disease. The figure would have continued to rise if it had not been for an unlikely alliance between a medical doctor, John Snow, and the vicar of St James Anglican church, Henry Whitehead. (10) John Snow was a working-class man who had risen to dizzy heights in the Victorian medical world, mainly through his discovery of anaesthesia; but his working class roots drew him constantly back to the problem of cholera. Henry Whitehead was a parish priest in the vicinity of Broad Street, Soho, in late August 1854 when he was faced with an unprecedented cholera epidemic visited upon his parishioners in which 623 people died in one week. The combination of Snow's medical knowledge and Whitehead's grassroots awareness of the community and family networks of death led to the identification of the Broad Street pump as the epi-centre of the disease.

The removal of the pump handle by Snow has become the stuff of public health legend, but it was Whitehead who had remembered the death of a little girl at 40 Broad Street a few days before the epidemic and who therefore did not show up in the data. His investigation revealed a direct link between the cesspool into which her faeces had been thrown and the well that fed the Broad Street pump. The link between cholera and water had been demonstrated; while it took a number of years to convince a rather reluctant medical fraternity and the vested interests of the water companies and their political allies in London of the water-borne theory of cholera, medical science has moved beyond the miasmic theory of disease. You and I have a greater life expectancy because of Snow and Whitehead, doctor and priest, scientist and community leader.

The Waters of Death

What Snow and Whitehead had demonstrated is that water causes death. This was not easy for the medical fraternity to accept because it is counter-intuitive. We believe that water causes life, or rather that water is life. For millennia, among people growing up in small settlements, engaging in agricultural pursuits irrigated by rain from the heavens, and drawing drinking water from flowing rivers, water was life. But the ability of water to create life created the life that created the industrial revolution, which drew people together in vast cities, in conditions that were too rapid for social evolution. In their turn, the cities of the industrial revolution created the possibilities of naval power, and the beginnings of globalization. So, 12,000 years after the last ice age and the emergence of human civilization as we know it today, in a fantastically short period of a few decades, humanity was thrust together in large cities in ways for which it was not prepared. Cholera was a sign and symbol of that social dislocation, and in the process water became something it was not. It became death.

To understand more deeply the link between water and death, we need to become familiar with the water situation on the planet. Water makes up 70 percent of our planet, and yet only 2.5 percent of that water is fresh. Much of that fresh water is locked up in polar ice caps and glaciers, and so "humans have access to less than 0.08 of I percent of the total water on the planet". (11) This limited water supply is also unevenly distributed. Six countries--Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia, China and Colombia--"have half of the world's total renewable fresh-water supply on their territory". (12) However, because human populations are also unevenly distributed, this means that Greenland's citizens have more water per capita than anyone else, whereas "the Palestinian desert enclave of the Gaza Strip is the most water-starved political unit on Earth". (13) Asia has two-thirds of the world's population, but only one-third of its water, 80 percent of which arrives in the short monsoon season. Closer to home, a third of all of Africa's fresh water goes down the Congo river, Mozambique has the greatest water supply in southern Africa, and South Africa is a seriously water-stressed country, (14) probably running out of water in 2025.

If the limited supply of fresh water is the first thing to note, and its uneven distribution is the second, then the actual use of fresh water is the third. Seventy percent of the fresh water we actually have access to--i.e. 70 percent of the 0.08 of 1 percent of total water on the planet, goes to industrial agriculture. The "green revolution" has increased food supply, but it is wiping out water supplies. "The world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it abstracts three times more water from rivers and underground aquifers to do it". (15) In order to harness this water for irrigation, 40,000 large dams (higher than 15 metres) have been built around the world so that "almost no natural body of water--that is, one unaffected by some kind of management of diversion scheme--exists anywhere in the world today". (16) This diversion interferes with the natural hydrological cycle, destroying freshwater rivers, which are the most essential ecosystems on earth.

The other destructive way water has been harnessed for industrial agriculture is through tapping aquifers, perhaps the most graphic illustration of humanity living off the balance sheet of the planet. Upward of 50 percent of the world's aquifers "are dangerously shallow or are becoming more and more contaminated with toxics". (17)

   There are few official statistics, and no way of collecting them.
   But just three countries--India, China and Pakistan--probably
   pump around 400 cubic kilometres of underground water a year from
   the new tubewells. They account for more than half of the world's
   total use of underground water for agriculture. And they are living
   on borrowed time, sucking dry the continent's water reserves ....
   Overall total pumping in India, China and Pakistan probably exceeds
   recharge by 150-200 cubic kilometres a year. The boom has so far
   lasted twenty years; the bust could be less than twenty years away.
   The consequences of the eventual, inevitable failure of underground
   water in these countries could be catastrophic. (18)

Now we must move to a fourth point, which is that access to fresh water is not just unevenly distributed in terms of geography and use, but is also unevenly distributed in terms of social power relations. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Report of 2006 captures the concern in its title: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis. This 250-page report points to a range of crucial issues at the intersection of justice, economy and ecology, arguing that "overcoming the crisis in water and sanitation is one of the great human development challenges of the early 21st century". (19) Here we can highlight the following points.

The internationally accepted threshold level for access to safe water is 20 litres per person per day, which equals about three toilet flushes. Nearly one-sixth of the world's population --1.1 billion people (out of a total of 6.5 billion)--do not have such access, and most of these live on less than 5 litres of water a day, a great deal less than the 400 litres a day used in the United States. Part of the tragedy is that dripping taps lose more water per day than the amount available to that 1.1 billion. More than a third of the planet's citizens--2.6 billion people--do not have access to basic sanitation. The report notes:

   "Not having access" to water and sanitation is a polite euphemism
   for a form of deprivation that threatens life, destroys opportunity
   and undermines human dignity. Being without access to water means
   that people resort to ditches, rivers and lakes polluted with human
   or animal excrement or used by animals. It also means not having
   sufficient water to meet even the most basic human needs. (20)

And because water is not just a good, but is an instrumental good, the human development impact of this deficit is massive. Drawing from the report, we note that there are 1.8 million child deaths a year as a result of diarrhoea: 4,900 each day. "Deaths from diarrhoea in 2004 were six times greater than the average annual deaths in armed conflict for the 1990s." Four hundred and forty-three million school days are lost each year. Just under 50 percent of citizens of developing countries suffer at any given time "from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits". (21) Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5 percent of GDP, or $28.4 billion, annually. Given these development concerns, it should not surprise us that access to water appears in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as goal 7, target 10: "To reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". Yet even if these goals are met, there will still be 800 million people without water and 1.8 billion people without sanitation in 2015.

It should be clear, but just to underline the point, the people who do not have access to water and sanitation are the poor. One-third of the people lacking access to clean water live on less than $1 a day, and another third live on less than $2 a day. A billion of those who have no access to sanitation live on less than $2 a day. For this reason, the UNDP report argues that "the availability of water is a concern for some countries, but the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical ability". (22) We have seen this point graphically represented in the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, in which the baddies are seeking to control not gold, diamonds, or nuclear devices, but the water supply of Bolivia. (23) This is a social commentary on our times, a telling reminder of what is emerging as the point of power in global politics. Alongside geo-political dimensions, the question of power and inequality is further underlined by the gender dimension of the problem. In many cultures, girls and women are the primary drawers of water. They are disadvantaged with rights to agricultural land for irrigation, and their sanitary, maternal and nursing needs are more acute. Thus, it is true: "In sanitation as in water, gender inequality structures the human cost of disadvantage". (24)

The report goes on to emphasize that the task of meeting even the minimum requirements of the MDGs requires a massive and intentional public investment. Access to adequate water and sanitation must become a human right, one that is safeguarded by nation states and protected by a global consensus. For this reason, the report is rightly critical of the privatization of water as a solution to the problem, because the market cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of the poor. (25) The report points to the example of Chile, where the privatization of water led to high levels of inequity. It could just as easily have pointed to Peru under the Fujimori government in 1990. Here a policy of "economic stabilization" with the withdrawal of consumer subsidies and the selling off of public companies created economic destabilization:

   Entering 1991, almost seventy percent of the population was living
   below the poverty line while more than fifty percent lacked access
   to adequate drinking water and sanitation services. In late January
   the "free-market" doctrine brought Peru its first cholera epidemic
   in more than 100 years. Within less than three months, the disease
   had claimed over 1,000 lives and infected more than 150,000 others.
   The head of the Pan-American Health Organization, Dr Carlyle
   Macedo, stressed the need for an international emergency plan to
   check the epidemic, which had spread to Colombia, Brazil, Chile and
   Ecuador. He warned a regional health ministers' conference in April
   that hopes of controlling the disease were receding: "It is almost
   inevitable that we will have an epidemic of a monstrous nature in
   Latin America which will be nearly impossible to contain." (26)

And so we return to cholera. Peru is not the only recent example. In recent years there have been outbreaks in Iraq, Orissa (India) and Vietnam. (27) Sixty thousand refugees from Rwanda died of cholera on the shores of lake Kivu in July 1994--6,000 alone on 24 July. (28) Closer to home, Zimbabwe has experienced a major cholera outbreak in the past months. Between August 2008 and April 2009, an estimated 96,591 people in the country have been infected with cholera and, by 16 April 2009, 4,201 deaths had been reported. (29) At the same time, 2,276 cases were diagnosed in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa, resulting in 19 deaths. (30) It is hard to escape the reality: water causes death.

Spirit, Water, Life?

What can it possibly mean to do theology in the time of cholera? I am not certain that I can answer that question comprehensively, or even adequately, but I can suggest some concerns that must be taken seriously.

(1) Whatever else we do as theologians, we cannot do theology other than in response to reality. Leonardo and Clodovis Boff are right--theology needs its socio-analytical mediation prior to its hermeneutical mediation. (31) As Jesus put it, we have to read the signs of the times (Luke 12:56, 57), and this requires, in the words of Jose Miguez Bonino,

   ... the recognition of social analysis as a constitutive moment in
   theological reflection on politics. It is "constitutive" for
   theology because theology has no other way of "knowing" the real or
   the political except through such analysis; theology has no direct
   access to the political subject matter. (32)

In many ways this is nothing new. Both Aquinas and Calvin taught us that understanding the world and ourselves is deeply related to understanding God, (33) which is why this paper starts with the reality of cholera in the world. We cannot speak glibly of God and of life, unless we understand the relationship between water and death for so many people in the world.

Given the realities of water and poverty, theology cannot take place other than in the time of cholera, and it cannot speak of God unless it knows what cholera is. What this means is that theology in the time of cholera cannot speak about life without a dialogue with the realities of economics, ecology and public health. In the African Religious Health Assets Programme (ARHAP) we speak of respectful dialogue and engagement, asking religious leadership, "How can we expect to make a real difference in the health and wellbeing of our communities, if we do not draw on the wisdom and experience of those dedicated to and trained in these fields?" (34) Precisely because Henry Whitehead was a priest, he did not retreat from the real-life experience of his parishioners, nor from a serious dialogue with a medical doctor. His respectful relationship with John Snow provided the context for a medical breakthrough that made a material difference to the life of the people of London and elsewhere.

(2) Knowing what cholera is is a first step, but theology must go on to ask what cholera means, because theology is at heart a hermeneutical task. I have hinted at this deeper question throughout my analysis--at issues of scarcity, power, justice and equity. That much should be obvious to anyone schooled in the basics of Christian ethics. But the real issue, it seems to me, arises from the juxtaposition of water and death, and the resultant cognitive shock that something we understand to be given by God--namely water--works not for life but for death. This point should destabilize any simple talk about "life" by theologians as if we know what it means. Of course Jesus came that we may have life and have it in abundance (John 10:10), and in that sense "life" itself is the meaning of life, but the concerns raised in this article call for a theological rethinking of the relationship between water and spirit.

When we read Jesus' response to Nicodemus--that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit (John 3:4, 5)--alongside the second creation story in which "the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7) then we tend to prioritize the Spirit as "the Lord, the giver of life" (as we recite in the Nicene Creed). There is truth in this, but only half the truth. For without water there is no life, and so separating spirit from water in the way we think of life or new life or abundant life is part and parcel of the age-old split between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, the sacred and the secular. It may also be a subtle contributor of anthropocentric elements in theology.

We are not apart from the earth and water. All creation is born of water and the spirit, for while the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, "a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Gen. 1.2). The truth of evolution is that all life evolves from water, and the truth of the hydrological cycle is that "we all live downstream". (35) There is only one stream of water. What passes through the bodies of humans passes through the bodies of animals, insects and plants, h flushes through our sanitation systems, flows through the rivers, seeps through wetlands, rises to the heavens to become clouds, and returns to nourish us and all living things. There is no life outside this cycle, and theology has to get real about it. Talking spirit without talking water is meaningless. It is the theological equivalent of the miasmic theory of disease.

(3) Thinking about water as the giver of life, Christian theology is led to an appreciation of water-affirming spiritualities from peoples outside the Christian faith. For just as it is true that water binds us to all living creatures and plants, so we share the same water cycle as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians and atheists. Christian theology has not always understood this point, and in fact has been threatened by the thought. At the Second Council of Aries, held in 452 AD, bishops were authorized to stamp out the worship of trees, fountains and stones. (36) The struggle to stamp out the veneration of holy wells continued for centuries in places like England. But it was contested by ordinary people, and particularly within Celtic spirituality. So, to coin a phrase, an aqua-centric theology is a theology that is willing to listen to those traditions that speak of the sacredness of water, of rivers, of wells. Perhaps we must recover what it means to have a baptismal font in the church, and to use water as the sign and seal of entry into the body of Christ.

(4) When we start to think of water and life from within the Christian tradition, then we should not be surprised to find a great deal about this point in the Bible. Water was there in Genesis 1, verse 2, as the stuff out of which creation emerged, and it appears in the last chapter of the Bible, in Revelation 22:1, 2, as "the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is one of the trees of life with twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." Many of the stories of the Bible would collapse if there were no river, no flood, no well, no pool, no sea, no fountain. Because the Bible is about life, and water is life, this should not surprise us. Because of this, Margaret Ferris has suggested a Blue Theology:

   The re-evaluation of water through a theological lens is a part of
   what I have termed "Blue Theology," and it is a valuable exercise
   for both secular and faith communities. For faith communities,
   examining underlying assumptions about water uncovers the
   traditional significance of water as shown in the biblical texts
   and in the Christian tradition of justice. For secular communities,
   such an exploration is a model of how a community might discover
   unarticulated yet detrimental assumptions about water. Further, for
   both communities it is a call to action to devise their own models
   of value of water--to discover how water is valuable and how it is
   to be cared for by all communities. (37)

The Ecumenical Water Network (EWN) has come into being in the last few years for very similar reasons, an initiative of the World Council of Churches, Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, All Africa Conference of Churches, Latin American Council of Churches, Church of Sweden, Bread for the World (Germany), Norwegian Church Aid, Church World Service (USA), Kairos Canada and others. (38) Following a meeting in May 2007 in Uganda, EWN released the Entebbe Statement, which includes the following:

   As churches and faith based organisations we affirm water as the
   cradle and source of life, an expression of God's grace in
   perpetuity for the whole of creation. We are called to exercise
   responsible stewardship for this unique trust, and to preserve and
   share it for the benefit of humanity and all creation. Further we
   share the following convictions: that access to water is a
   fundamental human right, that the protection and control of water
   resources is a central public responsibility, and that water must
   not be treated as a commodity but as an essential social good for
   the present and future generations. We recognise water as a sacred
   gift of God. (39)

(5) In a recent paper that engages with questions of water and sewage, I have raised the possibility of a "Jordan River motif" as a way of integrating the themes of liberation and creation, economics and ecology, poverty and environment in the face of the reality of sewage. (40) It is a way of giving a biblical metaphor to the olive agenda, which seeks to integrate both the brown agenda and the green agenda. (41) The reference to the Jordan River is precisely to raise up an aqua-centric moment in salvation history, in which the crossing of the waters that flow from life (Sea of Galilee) to death (The Dead Sea) is understood to be the moment of ethical commitment in the formation of the new community. It is not for nothing that the Deuteronomist selects this location for Moses to say, "Choose life so that you and your descendents may live" (Deut. 30:19).

I drew attention to five ethical principles that could guide us in the struggle for life in the face of sewage, water shortages and cholera. These were taking responsibility, valuing the commons, accepting legal limitations, nurturing vocation and remembering to celebrate. Here is not the place to spell these out in much depth, other than to remind ourselves that Christian theology has to be more than just contemplation of the mysteries and sacredness of water. Christian theology has to be rooted in the struggles of people in the midst of water shortages, denied access and cholera. In this sense, the title of Ivone Gebara's theological engagement with eco-feminism and liberation captures the heart of the matter: Longing for Running Water. (42)

(6) We have tried to unpack the theological meaning of water, cholera, life and death. At heart it is the yearning for and the visioning of another set of values for engaging our planet, our neighbours and all living things. Our engagement with cholera and the politics of water suggests that David Hallman is right when he says that "three of the most potent forces determining the character of contemporary Western societies are consumerism, economic globalization and violence". (43) The impact of these values in the service of industry, trade, colonialism and capitalism, in a way that the vector of life becomes the vector of death, is hauntingly captured in this passage from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's beautiful novel Love in the Time of Cholera.

The book is set in Colombia, South America. Towards the end of the book, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza have finally managed to be together after 50 years of being apart, and their love is blossoming on a boat trip up the Magdalena River. But while their love grows, the world around them dies:

   The days that followed were hot and interminable. The river became
   muddy and narrow, and instead of a tangle of colossal trees that
   had astonished Florentino Ariza on his first voyage, there were
   calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been
   devoured by the boilers of the riverboats, and the debris of god
   forsaken villages whose streets remained flooded even in the
   cruellest droughts. At night they were awakened not by the siren
   songs of manatees on the sandy banks but by the nauseating stench
   of corpses floating down to the sea. For there were no more wars or
   epidemics, but the swollen bodies still floated by The captain, for
   once, was solemn: "We have orders to tell the passengers that they
   are accidental drowning victims." Instead of the screeching of the
   parrots and the riotous noise of invisible monkeys, which at one
   time had intensified the stifling midday heat, all that was left
   was the vast silence of the ravaged land...

   ... An English traveller at the beginning of the nineteenth
   century, referring to the journey by canoe and mule that could last
   as long as fifty days, had written: "this is one of the most
   miserable and uncomfortable pilgrimages that a human being can
   make." This had no longer been true during the first eighty years
   of steam navigation and then it became true again forever when the
   alligators ate the last butterfly and the maternal manatees were
   gone, the parrots, the monkey, the villages were gone: everything
   was gone. "There is no problem," the Captain laughed. "In a few
   years we'll ride the dry riverbed in luxury automobiles." (44)

This is a parable of modernity. We have a beautiful river and beautiful trees, and they flourish in the web of life. But to go faster, we invent a steamboat. To power the boat we cut down the trees. But the cutting of the trees leads to the silting up of the river, which in turn stops the boats. Now we have no river, no boat and no trees. The captain gives voice to the dominant hope of our culture that something more technologically advanced will solve the problem.

But the bodies keep floating down the river. Water, life, death, cholera. We have to vision a new way of being on the planet. Reminding ourselves that we are born of both water and spirit is a good place to begin.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-6623.2010.00057.x

(1) This paper was first presented at the annual meeting of the Theological Society of South Africa, Stellenbosch, 25 June 2009.

(2) All Bible quotations come from the New Revised Standard Version, National Council of Churches of Christ, USA, 1989.

(3) Steve Johnson, The Ghost Map: A Street, a City, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks, Penguin, London, 2008, p. 8. Chapter 1, "The Night-Soil Men", provides a graphic description of the wider work of urban recycling in Victorian London.

(4) Johnson, The Ghost Map, p. 10.

(5) Johnson, The Ghost Map, p. 12.

(6) I have drawn much of my information from the Wikipedia entry, on "Cholera" (Accessed 23 June 2009). That entry is carefully written and points to substantial peer-reviewed back references. For this section, the following are noted: K.J. Ryan and C.G. Ray, eds., Sherris Medical Microbiology, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2004, pp. 376-77; S.M. Faruque and G.B. Nair, eds., Vibrio cholerae: Genomics and Molecular Biology, Caister Academic Press, Hethersett, UK, 2008; K. McLeod, "Our Sense of Snow: John Snow in Medical Geography", Soc Sci Med 50.7-8 (2000):923-35; "Cholera: Prevention and Control", World Health Organization, Geneva. 2007, http://www.who.int/topics/cholera/ control/en/index.html (Accessed 3 January 2008)

(7) Robert Morris, The Blue Death, Harper, New York, 2008, p. 11.

(8) As quoted in Morris, The Blue Death, p. 47.

(9) Morris, The Blue Death, p. 51.

(10) The gripping story is told in Johnson's remarkable book, The Ghost Map. Morris's book The Blue Death also covers this story in his chapter "The Doctor, the Priest, and the Outbreak at Golden Square", pp. 75-95.

(11) I am drawing this data from Jeffrey Rothfeder, Every Drop fir Sale: Our Desperate Battle aver Water in a World About to Run Out, Penguin, New York, 2004, p. 8.

(12) Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? Transworld, London, 2007, p. 36.

(13) Pearce, When the Rivers Ran Dry, 36. The data in the rest of the paragraph comes from the same source.

(14) See World Wildlife Fund, Global Footprint Network and Swiss Agency for Development and Coop, Africa: Ecological Footprint and Human Well-being, p. 17. Available at www.footprintnetwork.org/download.php?id=7654 (Accessed 30 October 2008)

(15) Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry, p. 38.

(16) Rothfeder, Every Drop for Sale, p. 20.

(17) Rothfeder, Every Drop for Sale, p. 127.

(18) Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry, p. 79.

(19) UNDP, Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, p. 1. Available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2006 (Accessed 9 February 2009)

(20) UNDP, Beyond Scarcity, p. 5.

(21) See UNDP, Beyond Scarcity, p. 6.

(22) UNDP, Beyond Scarcity, p. 2.

(23) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Quantum_of_Solace (Accessed 5 June 2009)

(24) UNDP, Beyond Scarcely, p. 6.

(25) UNDP, Beyond Scarcity, p. 17.

(26) James Petras and Morris Morley, Lalin America in the Time of Cholera: Electoral Politics, Market Economics, and Permanent Crisis, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, New York, 1992, pp. 53-54.

(27) This information is drawn from the Wikipedia entry on "Cholera". (Accessed 23 June 2009). That entry has considerable reputable academic back references.

(28) Morris, The Blue Death, pp. 257-68.

(29) World Health Organization: Zimbabwe Daily Cholera Updates; WHO Zimbabwe Daily Cholera Update, 16 April 2009; World Health Organization. Cholera in Zimbabwe: Epidemiological Bulletin Number 16 Week 13 (22-28 March 2009). March 31, 2009; WHO Zimbabwe Daily Cholera Update, 16 April 2009.

(30) 381 new cholera cases in Mpumalanga, News24, 24 January 2009.

(31) Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology, Burns and Oats, Tunbridge Wells, UK, 1987.

(32) Jose Miguez Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1983, p. 45.

(33) Thomas Aquinas: "An error about the world redounds in error about God". (Summa contra Gentiles II,3.); John Calvin: "Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God". (First sub-clause of the Christian Institutes [Book 1,1.1.]).

(34) African Religious Health Assets Programme, Appreciating Assets: The Contribution of Religion to Universal Access in Africa. Report for the World Health Organization, ARHAP, Cape Town, October 2006, p. 130. See http://www.arhap.uct.ac.za (Accessed July 1, 2008)

(35) This is a recurrent theme in Tara Lohan, ed., Water Consciousness, Alternet Books, San Francisco, 2008. The introduction is titled "We All Live Downstream", p. 8.

(36) There is an interesting critique of this point in Vandana Shiva, "The Sacred Waters" in Lohan, Water Consciousness, p. 172.

(37) Margaret H Ferris, "When the Well Runs Dry: An Exploration of Water Conservation and Blue Theology", in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6.3 (Summer 2006), p. 2. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/063/ferris.shtml (Accessed 12 September 2008)

(38) The Ecumenical Water Network, http://water.oikoumene.org

(39) http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=3633 (Accessed 13 November 2008)

(40) See Steve de Gruchy, "Dealing with Our Own Sewage: Spirituality and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda", Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 134 (July 2009), pp. 53-65.

(41) See Steve de Gruchy, "An Olive Agenda: First Thoughts on a Metaphorical Theology of Development", The Ecumenical Review, 59, April/July 2007, pp. 333-45.

(42) Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1999. For some reason, however, she does not work with this metaphor at all in the content of the book itself.

(43) David G Hallman, Spiritual Values for Earth Community. WCC Publications, Geneva, 2000, p. 18.

(44) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, Penguin, London, 2007, pp. 336-37.

Steve de Gruchy was a minister of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa and professor of theology and development at the School of Religion and Theology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was also editor of the Journal of Theology for South Africa. He died in a river accident at the age of 48 on 21 February 2010, this issue of The Ecumenical Review is dedicated to him.