For the past three days I’ve been mulling over and over in my mind the question of how much water I use in a day.
Figure the amount for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, flushing the toilet. In the U.S. the average is around 75 gallons a day per person.
I thought about this as our Landcruiser came upon a woman and her two young children on the side of a desolate road in Samburu District in central Kenya. In this area of about 170,000 people, women (they’re the ones who assume this task) walk an average of six miles every day to find water. They walk in sandals along dirt roads covered in canyons of scalding hot rocks and boulders. Some climb miles into the hillsides, searching for a fresh spring. Then, they walk all those miles back, carrying up to 20-liter containers of water for their families.
On this particular day, I was traveling with International Medical Corps’ country director for Kenya, Peter McOdida, as well as a Samburu District water official. The woman and her children whom we met were nowhere near a water source and had to resort to begging by the side of the road for whatever we or any other passersby might be able to provide. As we poured water into their containers, the two young girls playfully fought over them.
In this remote region of Kenya, water and the pursuit of it is everything.
Many Samburus go days without a drop. In the dry season, which constitutes a total of eight months of the year, they consume an average of about half a liter a day. Sometimes, they go with none. And whatever amount they are able to find goes immediately to drinking, sharing with farm animals, and cooking. Washing and general hygiene are a luxury. In the end, unsafe and insufficient clean water means sick children, unhealthy food, and malnutrition because animals don’t have enough to drink and fruits and vegetables are unable to thrive.
But there is another troubling result to the many hours that women and girls spend every day searching for water: these are hours that could’ve been spent getting an education or generating income. And for women with infants, this is time not spent breastfeeding. The lack of access to water compromises the health of the entire family.
So, what to do.
As in many of the crisis zones where International Medical Corps operates, a big part of the solution already exists within the community and it’s a matter of engaging the local population in fixing problems in a sustainable way. Samburu has numerous water points throughout the region but they are too far apart and/or are in disrepair, and are not being managed properly.
This month, Starbucks announced it was awarding $1 million to International Medical Corps over the next two years to train villagers and water officials in building and maintaining water supply systems in Samburu, as well as building latrines and providing hygiene and sanitation education programs.
We visited one of those water points slated for construction – in a village called Waso Rongai. There, we met a woman and her young daughter who had traveled about two miles to collect water from what amounted to a small bore hole in the middle of the sand. I peered into the hole at the dirty brown water as she scooped out cupfuls and poured them into a jerry can. For her, dirty water was better than no water at all. I dreaded to think what sorts of water-borne diseases she and her family might contract by drinking this.
She said what many other Samburus told me during this trip: “There is no water where we live and we have to travel great distances to find any. We need help.”
To get a sense of how International Medical Corps has already started helping, we went south to a village called Seren, where International Medical Corps worked with residents to construct a system of pipelines that extend to a freshwater spring about three miles up the mountainside. Before those water pipelines were there, women were forced to climb the mountain every day to reach the water source.
As I slowly – very slowly – made my way up this mountainside laden with boulders and dry sand, I imagined what it must be like for a woman to undertake this same trek day in and day out. I had a one liter bottle of water with me, which was empty by the time I reached the top, drenched in sweat and thoroughly out of breath. But that woman would have gone on that journey without water, then carried her heavy container back down the mountain.
Imagine what her life would be if the daily search for water were no longer a concern? As Peter said to me, “You fix the water problem and everything else falls into place.” A simple statement and I suspect a right one.