How has the world water crisis affected you?
An entire village of northern Kenyan pastoralists, pushed by conflict over water and other resources, has been forced to set up this makeshift refugee camp near Dillo, in southern Ethiopia.
Photo: Photo by Alex Stonehill.
It is dawn and the camels move past the truck like shadows. They seem too tired to talk, their heads bent down as they plod on along the dirt track. The only sound they make is the light thud of their feet hitting the white sand. Perhaps they are embracing the morning in silence; watching the last few rebellious stars disappear as the pink sky turns the acacia trees to silhouettes. Or, and this is much more likely, they are quiet because they are walking through a graveyard and do not want to wake the dead.
The dirt track is littered with animals and the taste of decay fills the air. As I wander away from the truck to urinate on a small bush, I have to pick my way through the bodies of donkeys, cattle, and goats. The camels have to do the same, and, like me, they see thirsty expressions still frozen on their faces. I stumble into one, my foot hitting the sun-dried skin as though it were the surface of a drum. A deep sound resonates through empty rib bones.
"Let's go," shouts Aden, as the engine of the old Italian water tanker starts up. "We still have a long way to travel before we get there." We are on our way to deliver water to stranded pastoralists in Wajir district of Northern Kenya, and the camels are travelling the other way hoping to reach a well, somewhere, before it gets too hot. Closing the door I look out at them through the window and all I see is pain. How easy it is to see suffering through a frame, particularly when this frame is formed from irony.
The world water crisis is simply that, a crisis of irony. How else can it be that on a planet made up of over 70 percent water, 20 percent of the population just over 1 billion people do not have access to clean water? Does it make sense that for many of us that do have access, particularly in dry regions of the world like here in Northern Kenya, water resources are becoming more limited as trends in poverty, land degradation, rapid urbanization, and climatic change increase? And, what does it show that in other places, such as in India where 3 million people were displaced last month by flooding, there appears to be too much water?
Lumping people together into numbers and statistics removes us from the problem at hand. The world water crisis is, like any other, a personal one. Imagine the pastoralist who has lost his livestock to drought or a mother of five children who does not have clean water to cook with. Imagine the fisherman who has no more lake to fish in, or the farmer with no more irrigation for his corn. The world water crisis has also affected me in this same personal way: I have been forced to reinterpret suffering and reform the frame through which we view distant strangers. I have also been shown how closely my choices relate to the challenges people face far away.
Borena Zone, southern Ethiopia.
Photo: Alex Stonehill
By late-morning we pull into a sandy clearing. Families, with young children and old men, sit waiting amidst their piles of empty water jugs around a deep hole in the ground. Gathered behind them are a few groups of donkeys standing amidst skeletons of other livestock. They are all waiting for water. Just as they do every three days, Aden and his crew drape a plastic tarp over the hole and begin filling the pool with water. In this dry, dusty place, each family of five receives 20 liters to last the three days until the truck returns.
There are enough hands now busy in the pool. Aden and his crew are trying to regulate who gets what and mark down the names of those that received water. It is a daunting task. Looking for a bit of respite, I find a small ray of shade near a leaf-less tree. It too wants a drink of water. I sit down on the protruding root and, looking up, see an old man with bony features, a dirty white robe, and a cloth around his head approach me. His name is Salim, one of the village elders.
"We came here because it was the last place of pasture for our animals. Without them, we will die." Gripping his camel stick he continued, "The closest water is three days walk and the animals are too weak to make it back to the wells. Most have died and now we are stuck here. It did not used to be like this."
As he spoke another man, also an elder with red ochre in his beard, sat down next to us on the sand. "We don't like to take water like this," he added. "It makes us feel helpless and then what will people think. We are not helpless, we have always lived here, but now the rain doesn't come; there is no food for the camels. When you go, tell them that is the reason. Tell them we need rain".
Now, sitting in a brick row house in Washington DC, I look out my window onto the street. The fire hydrant at the end of the block is leaking water and it runs down along the curb stone. It has been leaking most of the day. From a place of abundance it is easy to look through our lenses the cameras, the televisions, and the radios and remove the emotions, the attitudes, and the passions from the images we see. The water crisis has forced me to see these things; now I realize the challenge is just as much about providing access to water as it is about limiting waste and the factors that cause it.
Those pastoralists in Northern Kenya are not helpless. It is our attitude that lets us see it this way. After all, if we had no water, we'd seem helpless too.
Editor's Note: This essay is the winner of our recent writing contest, sponsored by Helium.com. Click here to read some of the other contest entries.