PODCAST: George McGraw Digs Deep

Solveig Rennan
Welcome to Under-Told: Verbatim. I’m Solveig Rennan for the Under-Told Stories Project. We report from all over the world for PBS NewsHour, we’ve talked to experts and people making a difference in their communities. In this podcast, we’re revisiting those Under-Told Stories to share extended interviews we’ve done with changemakers around the world. As the COVID-19 pandemic grows, we hear constant reminders to wash our hands in order to prevent the virus from spreading. For most, this is as easy as walking to the sink. But how can you wash your hands if you turn the faucet and nothing comes out? Or if your home never had a faucet in the first place?

George McGraw
When the backhoe is active. Everyone needs to have a hard hat on

Solveig Rennan
George McGraw and his organization Dig Deep used to bring water access to communities in Africa. But a few years ago, he turned his attention to the United States

George McGraw
When I meet someone, for instance, on a plane and when I tell them we’re working in New Mexico or Arizona or California, they’re like, Come again? like that, there’s no way there are people in this country who don’t have this thing.

Solveig Rennan
Our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro spoke to McGraw in 2018 in the Navajo Nation

George McGraw
we’re looking at about 70,000 people without access to water sanitation.

Solveig Rennan
The native reservation spans 27,000 square miles across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, where 40% of the homes lack running water or sanitation. Many are in such remote areas that they will never be able to connect to a water line.

Fred
Why do you do what you do?

George McGraw
You know, it’s a great question. I’ve always been in love with water. I was that kid whose mom would take into the zoo and like she turned around to talk to somebody and she turned back around, look at me and I’d strip naked and was, you know, playing in a fountain or something? I think it’s an incredible injustice that people in this country don’t have access to this basic thing that everyone else in our country takes for granted. And I’m going to be working on this until that problem’s solved.

Fred
Do you suspect that most of us in the United States have no idea how many people like this basic amenity?

George McGraw
Yeah, I mean, I think I think Americans of anyone I’ve ever encountered have the worst relationship with our water. We use more of it than anyone else in the world, more than double what someone in Germany or the UK uses. And we have no concept of how valuable it is how much it really matters, which is really the first thing you learn working with families out here, how much you take it for granted, and how much they don’t.

Fred
And tell us a little bit more about conditions here. It’s not just water. It’s other basic amenities that we take for granted in a modern society.

George McGraw
I mean, that’s true for everybody without access to water in the United States. I mean, there’s a reason why Those 2 million people in the country don’t have this basic thing that everyone else has. Right. And it’s, it’s tied to poverty, it’s tied to politics. Most of these communities are rural, socio economically marginalized communities of color. And so you can’t really pull the water problem out of this knot of marginalization, poverty, racism, displacement that exists here on the Navajo Nation.

Fred
You hope to do 250 approximate 276.

George McGraw
Yeah. And in this specific area, this project is going to serve 276 families,

Fred
you’re not going to rest until it’s done. But it’s going to be a very, very long time and a very, very expensive problem to fix. Right? Give us a give us a sense of how expensive and in the scope of the task, were we to solve the problem entirely?

George McGraw
Well, this is really, there are a couple ways to thinking about solving this problem. Here in the Navajo Nation. We’re looking at about 70,000 people without access to water sanitation. solving that problem is really going to have to be collaboration between organizations like ours, the Navajo Nation, the federal and state governments. I really think this is something we could eradicate in our lifetimes. If we really put our nose to the grindstone and invest the right amount of funds, 35, maybe 40 years. And if that work is happening in parallel and other communities across the country, I think this is something I could certainly say goodbye to before I die.

Fred
You know, we were at Tina’s house today

Solveig Rennan
Tina Bicenti is raising her five children on her family’s ancestral lands without electricity or running water. They used to drive a mile to her mother’s house to fill jugs with water. But a new cistern installed by Dig Deep will save them the trip

Fred
house today. And Tina was telling us that it’s 12,000 plus, to bring a water line from her mother’s house to her house. And you multiply that by 2 million people who don’t have water hookups in this country. It sounds frankly implausible that we could ever solve this problem.

George McGraw
Well, you know, that’s what that’s where we come in as Dig Deep, our claim to fame is that we are taking the sort of low cost low tech community based approach to water that we’re using all over the world, in a lot of communities that you’ve read and have visited in places like Sub Saharan Africa or Latin America. And we’re deploying it here in the US. There are some places, and you know, some places here on the Navajo Nation where water and sanitation lines don’t make sense. And for a long time, we’ve told those people just wait infrastructure will catch up with you, well, infrastructure is not coming. And as we’ve told those people to wait, we’ve helped hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the world roll up their sleeves and get to work and get water and sanitation access now. So we really believe that we can take those same models we’re using abroad that put communities in charge and that install things like cistern and run things like trucks and solve that problem a lot quicker and a lot cheaper,

Fred
is the basic problem that they that these people because of their isolation, the people who live without, I just fundamentally not heard from simply because of their isolation?

George McGraw
I think it’s it’s that they’re not heard from. They’re definitely marginalized. And their voices aren’t really well represented. But I also think it’s an economic problem too, right? I mean, we rely on the free market in a lot of places to extend water and sanitation access in this country. And that served us well, I mean, 331 million Americans have water because of that. But these people don’t have access to a market. They’re, they’re remote. In some cases, they’re very impoverished. And the same kind of forces that bring water and sanitation to you and I in major US cities won’t work here.

Fred
Can they be a catalyst that is to say, Can new installations of water and probably electricity as well be catalyst to some kind of economic development or is that a little far fetched?

George McGraw
No, it’s not far fetched at all, and it makes all the difference. One of the very first families I visited out here, I was running Darlene’s water truck, and she came up with the water truck and we were just filling some barrels and buckets on their front porch. This was before we started these installs. And this woman this woman named Deborah ran out of her house with a bucket took a gallon directly off of the truck and ran back into the kitchen to make tamales. She has a an iterant, you know, salesperson license to sell these tamales that she makes in her kitchen. But she had been waiting 15 days for clean water. So I was you know, in the kitchen with her she was making tamales which she was going to walk down here to sell. And I was like, you know what’s the hurry? Why today? Are you in such a hurry to sell the tamales? She’s like, Well, my husband had a gangrene infection and was discharged from the hospital 10 days ago, but no one’s been able to go pick him up because without water I couldn’t make tamales without tamales. I I couldn’t sell it to get gas money without gas money, I couldn’t drive to the hospital pick him up, and he hasn’t been able to go to work for 10 days and bring that income and either a lack of clean water in the United States does exactly the same thing to families it does around the world. It impacts their health, their ability to hold down a job to get an education, their ability to spend time with their kids to play to have a happy life.

Fred
Talking a little bit about the mechanics of hooking people up.

George McGraw
Yeah.

Fred
Do you envision that this is going to be a series of localized or decentralized systems at the household level is this going to be networked. And to what extent of each, we’re going to have to proceed to serve everyone with clean water?

George McGraw
You know, if we’re talking about the country, sort of writ large, this problem, the solution is going to have to look very different in a place like the deep south or in Appalachia than it looks here. This sort of trucking program we operate here won’t work everywhere. But this is a good solution for where we are on Navajo. Here on Navajo, we’re interested in a decentralized model that’s really owned, operated and run by the communities it serves. So this is one example of that here with our partner St. Bonaventure, who are deeply embedded in the community and they hold quarterly community meetings together, elected and appointed officials in our classes. And decide where we’re going to go next and how we’re going to serve people. This project is really community LED. And we’re in the process of developing other community leaders in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, who will run the same kind of projects in their areas. wells are obviously the lifeblood of the projects that provides the water that we delivered by truck. There are a couple of reasons we keep developing new wells. One, when we bring a new home online with a water cistern, we give them access to more water than they’ve had before. When Darlene visits people and delivers to their buckets or barrels, they get a couple hundred gallons a month, when we deliver to them all of a sudden, you know, through our cistern systems, they’re getting 1200 to 2400 gallons a month, depending on how many people are in the house. And so the wells that we started the project with just can’t keep up with that demand.

Fred
So you have to dig?

George McGraw
We dig deep. Let’s see. We finished a pilot hole last year that went down to 1460 feet. A well we’re working on right now is much shallower or something like 440. But in some parts of the reservation, good water is really deep down.

Fred
If I were to ask you for examples of a dividend that’s been paid so far, since you began working here for four or so years ago, what example or two leaps to mind?

George McGraw
We have a lot of families who have gotten access to water and his kids have come home. There’s this big issue on Navajo right now where there’s a sort of youth brain drain. You know, kids grow up with access to television, you know, they go to school with a bunch of kids who took a shower this morning, and the minute they can leave the reservation to live in a place like Gallup or Grants close by, a place where they might, you know, have to just put down a few hundred dollars in rent and they get things like electricity and running water, they leave and their communities are really impacted here. Their parents, their grandparents are upset about this. So, you know, in in some of the homes that we put water and sanitation in, you see these these kids run back home and reunite with their families and hold down jobs here. It’s it’s a beautiful thing to see. And so if we can be a part of that movement, I think we’re, we’ve been successful.

Fred
Okay. What about the other things that need to fall into place? Talk about the challenges that you face? I mean, what are the biggest problems that you face in working in a place like this?

George McGraw
There are so many, similar to the point I just made, access to really skilled and committed labor is really difficult here. You’ve met some of our crew members like Annie and Brian and Cindy, and we are fortunate to work with some incredible people, but people who can do this kind of work and are willing to, you know, put their put their lives into this kind of work are difficult to come by anywhere, but especially out here. I also think that one of our big difficulties is, is honestly, it’s not something you’d really think about but most Americans, not knowing that this problem exists, therefore don’t know we exist. And so we spend a lot of our time out here working on water projects, but a lot more time in our office in Los Angeles, for instance, trying to convince everybody in america they should pay attention to this problem, care about it and want to do something about it.

Fred
Do people that you meet to randomly casually, you know, flying all over as you do, express surprise when when you tell them that your work is actually in America and not in Cameroon and not Kenya, where you were?

George McGraw
Yeah, I mean, it’s usually surprised when I say when I meet someone, for instance, on a plane and say, yeah, I work in water access help people get access to water like, Oh, that’s so great. You know, I have a cousin who raised money for that project in South Sudan or in Cameron places I used to work. And when I tell them we’re working in New Mexico or Arizona or California, they’re like, come again, like that. There’s no way there are people in this country who don’t have this thing. And that’s, that’s really what we’re up against.

Fred
Do people once they learn that we’re working is in Indian Country come around to saying, Oh, that’s different. I mean, do you sense that there’s less surprise.

George McGraw
I think it means something different to our older donors potentially or the older people I meet. Younger people that get involved with the organization don’t see such a distinction, just like younger people on the reservation don’t see such a distinction either. I think what’s important to know is that this is not an indigenous problem. You know, this, there are people living without running water, basic plumbing in every state of the union, in rural, in urban and peri-urban areas. And they all look very different from each other. And yes, some of them are native living on reservations, but a lot of them aren’t. And so that’s kind of our job as an organization to educate the American public about the fact that this is probably happening in your backyard.

Fred
Do people ever ask you How did it happen? How did we get to this? How do you respond?

George McGraw
People ask me that all the time, and I don’t always have a very good answer, I think, I think because we’ve taken some things for granted in this country. We’ve taken for granted that you know, everyone has achieved or had access to all the things they need for healthy, happy life at about the same rate, which simply isn’t true. I think there are a lot of people in cities that are ignoring what’s happening in the rest of America. And I think there are people in the rest of America who feel disconnected from the cities too. But I don’t have a good answer for why this happened, why this problem exists. It’s complicated.

Fred
What’s your five year 10 year plan?

George McGraw
Five years to really deepen on the Navajo Nation to work with the Navajo Nation government and our partners at the tribal utility authority to figure out what success really looks like here, how long it’s going to take, how much money it’s going to take and, and what our role in that can be 10 years having those same discussions in five places where water and sanitation poverty are happening in the country. And hopefully, within 10 years, having really catalyzed a movement of Americans from all walks of life to say, this problem shouldn’t exist, and we can do something about it in our lifetimes and, and having really made progress in that direction.

Fred
You worked in Cameroon and South Sudan prior to this.

George McGraw
Yeah

Fred
What fundamentally are differences between working in an environment like that and working in a place like this?

George McGraw
The material there are many materials, similar similarities. So a lot of our clients wake up in the morning and grab a bucket. And if they’re not fortunate enough like Tina to have access to a car or to their mom’s house, a lot of them walk, you know, a mile or two to grab some water out of a livestock windmill or even a pond, and they bring home water to the families that they know are going to make them is going to make them sick. And that’s something we used to see all the time in our work in Cameroon or South Sudan. The difference here is I think in positional poverty in a place like South Sudan or Cameroon, if you live rurally, you’ve never had access to water and no one around you has it either. And it’s such an incredible gift when you get it and in fact, it’s a human right, everyone should have it. But you’re not aware of how hard it is not to have it. Here, you know, in places like Tina’s home her kids go everyday to a public school, where their friends you know, took a shower this morning, brush their teeth this morning, they had a home cooked meal that the water from which came out of their sink. And that kind of positional poverty knowing that you’re poor, knowing that you don’t have this thing that creates real difficulty. Some of our clients are depressed because they don’t have access to a tap or a toilet. And that’s very different from what our work used to look like in places like Cameroon or South Sudan, where every aspect of our work was a celebration.

Fred
Although, you know, we’ve met people here on this reservation who say, you know, we adapt, and we get by.

George McGraw
They sure do.

Fred
What’s the per capita consumption of water here versus the U.S. average?

George McGraw
I don’t think there’s been a good average taken of everybody on the reservation. I can say in the homes where we install, the per capita water consumption rate stays at about at a max five gallons per person per day, the average in the United States is well over 100 who says, you know, to survive every day you need for to be within your human rights sort of framework you need somewhere between 25 and 50 as the minimum for a day to be really comfortable somewhere probably closer to 50, 75.

Fred
Anything else that you’d like to share with us?

You know, I think what’s interesting or really important about Dig Deep’s work is that we never come anywhere and say this is the solution. This solution that you see today, it looks like we came up with it. But it was actually invented by this community through a lot of meetings and listening sessions and people saying, you know, what we want and what will work? I have learned a tremendous amount as a white outsider being here, and I’m constantly humbled by that. But I think our work has really only become effective and certainly has only started to scale. Since the majority of our staff here now come from this community.

You must witness a lot of suffering or evidence of suffering in the homes you serve.

George McGraw
Yeah, a lot of suffering and a lot of joy. I think that’s true everywhere.

Solveig Rennan
Our interview with George McGraw was originally featured in our story called “How Off Grid Residents are Getting Running Water, which aired on PBS NewsHour on June 21, 2018. To check out the full story, go to undertoldstories.org. This episode was hosted by me, Solveig Rennan and produced and edited by Simeon Lancaster. The interview was conducted by our director Fred de Sam Lazaro. In our next few episodes, we’ll explore HIV prevention with the condom king of Thailand

Mechai
One must not be embarrassed by the condom itself from a rubber tree like a tennis ball if you’re embarrassed by the condom, you must be more embarrassed by the tennis ball, there’s more rubber in it.

Solveig Rennan
and fighting female genital cutting in Senegal.

Molly Melching
Using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changin social norms.

Solveig Rennan
You can find every Under-Told: Verbatim episode, virtual reality 360 experiences and our entire library of Under-Told news reports from around the world at undertoldstories.org. Under-Told: Verbatim is brought to you by the Under-Told Stories Project based at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. As always, thanks for your support.