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Water scarcity increases woman’s burden
2006-01-06 08:45:20
By Holidah John
Water is life. This a very common saying that people take for granted until there is no rain and all taps run dry.
Everyone knows pepper can itch or can be painful when it gets to the eyes, but you cannot explain exactly how painful it is, until it gets to your own eyes.
Like in the case of water or oxygen, people only realize importance of such basic necessities when they cannot access them.
People who are fortunate to live in places where there is enough water flowing in their taps, using it the way they feel like, necessarily and unnecessarily, hardly understands the meaning of water is life.
At a time like this, everybody can see there is drought and possibilities of people dying from hunger are high if it does not rain soon and no help is offered to the poorest of the poor.
Common mwananchi in both urban and rural areas even under normal circumstances experience trauma and depression year in out living hand to mouth life, and now the water scarcity is like adding salt to injury.
Just give a thought to poor farmers. Their entire livelihood depends on the seeds sowed in the farm, which after germination have been condemned to ’death’ by hot, merciless sun.
With the culture of traditional African granaries having been thrown to dogs, all what the farmers are waiting for is now a miracle, where the government and international agencies have to provide relief food.
Water menace is a compound problem for women and children who have to experience the harsh reality more than men in a household.
In urban as well as rural areas, it is the women and children who have to trek long distances in search of water.
In Dar es Salaam you will hardly see a man carrying a water bucket, unless doing it for business.
When taps are dry the womenfolk have to scratch their heads on where to get water.
Despite the added responsibility, they still have to carry all the normal duties in the household that are unfairly defined as a duty of women.
A lady in Ubungo Kibango area, stayings with her family is heavy with her second child and takes care of her hardly 3-year old twin boys. She doesn’t have a maid and there has been no running water for over a month.
The lady cannot fetch water herself and the husband will hear none of it.
So on that particular day she bought from street vendors water, which she did not know the origin of.
Was it safe or not? She had no way to establish.
When her husband returned from work she, like a good wife, dutifully welcomed him with a cup of juice.
She then prepared his bath, with the water she had bought earlier in the day.
No sooner had her husband been to the bathroom than he was back in the house, his body half covered from the waist downward in towel, the rest of his body in soap foam.
Hardly had he been there for three minutes, we saw him back in the sitting room, with only a towel covering his waist and soap all over his body.
’Where did you get this water, which smells like a ten year old corpse?’ he asked, breathing fire and brimstones.
The lady explained she had bought it from a street vendor.
Nothing could mollify the man, and he wanted to be taken to the vendor to teach the boy a lesson.
To make it worse, he was heaping blame on the poor woman for not going to fetch water herself despite her advanced pregnancy.
Men can be nasty! I left their house before the issue had been resolved thinking of how water from streams across Dar es Salaam is know being sold for domestic consumption.
Which of Dar streams or rivers can boast of clean water? None, I can bet.
Raw sewage from homesteads that are not covered by the main sewerage system in the city, routinely empty the mess in the streams.
There is a river that cuts across Mabibo, which has been turned into a real sewerage.
Water vendors don’t care and find it okay to fetch water there for sale.
We cannot do without water but surely use of water mixed up with sewage is courting a health disaster.
In fact the vendors selling such water knowingly are outright criminals endangering human life.
There are environmental laws in this country and it’s illegal for anybody or any entity to empty sewage into streams, rivers, lakes or oceans.
Dar es Salaam being the administrative city of the country, I don’t see why the authorities cannot be able to contain the menace.
This is laissez-faire at its worst. No wonder it has been so difficult to get rid of cholera in the city.
Water scarcity or not our bodies need water to exist. It is one commodity that we cannot do without or we would kick the bucket.
Local authorities as well as the wananchi must ensure those who are selling the precious commodity only deal with safe and clean water.
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