One of the most urgent problems facing the poor in eastern Zambia right now is a lack of clean, abundant water. The sinking water table has caused an increasingly desperate situation for families who depend on streams and shallow wells for their daily needs.
It felt wrong to reach for my water bottle. The thirst was a perpetual itch just beyond hand’s reach. Throughout the week, we’d been traveling from one remote village to the next — each a nearly identical sprawl of thatched-roof houses, dirt paths and sun-scorched farmland.
My recent bout of the stomach flu has made me grateful for some things: A comfortable bed. A toilet inside my home. Clean water when I’m dehydrated. Money for a doctor (and a vehicle to get to the clinic).
“It used to be very hard to get water. Without rain, we were traveling long distances and life was very difficult. Before, we used to take shifts at the water source because it would become so congested. People would come to use this one little tank and trough, arriving at 4 a.m. and continuing on until 9 p.m.
For 53-year-old Ana Curazo and her 8 children in Rancho Pando, Nicaragua, contaminated water is now a thing of the past!
I first met Janet Kisari last February on a visit to Ewuaso Kedong, an area in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley devastated by cyclical drought. As a widow, she was then struggling to support her five children.