World Water Day

World Water Day was March 25. As those of you who regularly drop by here know, the water issue is near and dear to my daily life. (I’m posting this on April 9th because I’m on vacation and don’t have a phone at home.)

Water here in Southwest Sumbawa is an issue because we routinely have problems with access to water. Our village pump regularly breaks, and thus we don’t have running water until it’s fixed. Digging wells helps some of the villagers, but in our case, our land is situated where the water table is so low that digging a well has proven extremely difficult, and the workers that we hired for our two attempts quit after getting down 25 meters and finding no water.

At one point two years ago, we went five weeks without running water. Because the mining company that’s located next to our village has a tap outside their gates where the local community can access clean water, everyone in the village was able to have water for bathing and doing laundry and dishes, as well as for sanitation. We did have to drive the 15 minutes to the tap and fill up all of our containers and get them home everyday. If we hadn’t had the mine’s facility available to us, I’m not sure what we would have done. It was during that time, that I really first started thinking about the water crisis for a large part of the world population.

I read a statistic the other day that an estimated 1.5 million children a year die from diarrhea which is associated with a lack of water for drinking and sanitation.

Here’s an excerpt from a Salon.com article on water:

Here is a description by Caryn Boddie, an American writer who traveled to Kaikungu, Kenya to assess water-treatment issues and found that local women regularly walked 11 hours to fetch water for their families: "...during the dry season, the women have had to wake up at 2 A.M. on many mornings, leave their husbands and children still sleeping in bed, and go off to fetch water in the dark. They have walked to the Watumba River or have gone to buy from others who have wells. After they access the water, they carry it home, not returning home until 1 P.M. When the women complete the journey, they are too tired to do anything else in their homes or on their shambas (farms). Sometimes, they have walked to get water and back without any breakfast or lunch."

It's not just a matter of sheer neglect that has kept so many families without safe water, but also the fact that many water projects -- spearheaded by governments and non-profit groups -- don't work for the communities they are supposed to serve. (Sometimes wells are drilled but not outfitted with pumps, or wells which would require residents to pay for water are drilled close to a natural (and free) water spring and end up endangering it.) Women continue to travel to ensure their families' supplies, and water engineering has become an explicit feminist issue.

With retirement looming on the near horizon, I’m looking at ways that I can get involved in the movement to develop solutions for the water problem both in Indonesia and in other developing countries.