Slides That Follow Your Voice: South African Accent Charity Appeal

Slide 1: A tank

0:17Thank you for having me, and thank you for the sandwiches, which I was told were for the speakers, and which I have interpreted generously. [laughs]

0:27I want to talk to you about a tank. Not a metaphor, an actual green plastic tank, five thousand litres, about the height of a tall man, with a gutter running into the top of it and a tap at the bottom.

Slide 2: One tank: 11,400 rand

0:43It costs eleven thousand two hundred, sorry, eleven thousand four hundred rand to buy, deliver and install, including the gutters, the concrete base, and a small device called a what do they call it, a first-flush diverter, which throws away the first dirty water off the roof after a dry spell so that the rest is clean. That tank is the whole ask tonight, multiplied by thirty-eight. Thirty-seven, actually, one was done last month, but the slide says thirty-eight, so, thirty-eight.

1:21Here's why. In the Umkhoma district, where our trust works, there are thirty-eight primary schools that aren't connected to piped water. The municipal truck is meant to come twice a week. In the year we measured, it came, on average, came, on average, once every nine days.

Slide 3: When the truck does not come

1:43When the water doesn't come, the school closes at midday, because you can't run um... toilets for three hundred children without it, and when the school closes at midday the children walk home, and the older girls walk to the river instead, with a twenty-litre container, and they don't come back the next morning. That's the whole problem, to be honest. It's not complicated.

2:10We put the first tank on the roof of Ntabeni Primary in March twenty twenty-two. Somebody's phone. It's fine. It's fine, leave it, it's probably the municipality. No? Okay. I once sat through a presentation where a man told us his borehole had changed the climate of a valley. The climate. So I've made my slides ugly on purpose. You'll have noticed. Let me, I need, I want to be careful... I want to be careful about what I claim, because I've sat where you're sitting and heard people claim the moon.

2:50So here is what we measured, and only that. Before the tank, Ntabeni closed early sixty-one days in the school year. After the tank, seven days.

Slide 4: Ntabeni Primary, measured

3:02Attendance among the girls in the two top grades moved from seventy-one percent to eighty-eight percent. The principal, Mrs Dlomo, who doesn't trust anyone with a clipboard, tallied it herself, and then she asked why we hadn't come sooner, which, look, was fair. [laughs]

3:22We've now installed fourteen tanks, and thirteen of them are full tonight, because it rained on Sunday. The arithmetic isn't hard, and I promised the chair I wouldn't do it from the stage, so I'll just say that it's a number with six digits, and that there are people in this room for whom it's a car.

Slide 5: Fourteen in, twenty-four to go

3:44I know the objection, because I had it myself. Why a trust, why not the municipality. And the answer is that the municipality should, and we tell them so, in writing, every quarter, with the data, and in the meantime there's a girl at Ntabeni called Zanele who is eleven and wants to be a radiographer, and she can't wait for a quarterly meeting to go her way. [sighs]

Slide 6: Why a trust?

4:13Zanele asked me, last time I was there, whether a radiographer has to be good at maths. I said yes. She said, then I'll be good at maths. Like that was that. Shame, she's eleven. I drove four hours home thinking about it, and the road's bad, so that's a long time to think.

4:36Here's what I'm not asking. I'm not asking you to adopt a school, or sponsor a child, or get a uh, a newsletter with a photograph of yourself in it. I'm asking for tanks.

Slide 7: The whole relationship

4:51If you give one, you'll get a message from me with the name of the school, a photograph of the tank, and the attendance numbers at the end of the year, good or bad. That's the whole relationship. Clean water in, honest numbers out.

5:08There's a form on your table. There's also, I'm told, a second plate of sandwiches on its way, and I'm not going to touch it. Unless it's the egg ones. Then I make no promises. [chuckles]

Slide 8: Clean water in, honest numbers out

5:24Thank you.