Since my friend left for Niger in late January, I haven’t exactly been worried about her safety, despite an escalation of violence by a local rebel group and reported kidnappings on the border of Niger and Mali. Mostly, I’ve been concerned about her health. As I’ve mentioned before, Niger remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and water—even dirty, bacteria-laden, brackish water—is scarce. However, I was less distressed over her going thirsty, than I was of her developing a water-borne illness of the cholera kind I have been reading and writing about lately. Therefore, when my friend traveled to the bush—the Azawak region of Niger, where her organization would survey a water borehole built last year—and I didn’t hear from her for three weeks, my fears began to creep over me. Not knowing her Skype digits, I sent a Facebook email—a smoke signal from 6,000 miles away.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ1993-1923/Giacomo Pirozzi |
| In Niger, women (some with babies strapped to their backs) use buckets held with ropes to fetch water from a well covered with logs, near the village of Melam. |
In the weeks she was gone, a lot happened at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF—including the release of the 2009 State of the World’s Children report and the launch of some new initiatives. And now it is World Water Week, and the U.S. Fund's Tap Project is in full swing. For those of you who don’t know, the Tap Project is a campaign encourages patrons of participating restaurants to donate $1 for the tap water they normally drink for free. One child can drink clean water for 40 days on that dollar bill—a fact I did not know before I came to the U.S. Fund. This statistic, in particular, has prompted me to action on behalf of the Tap Project.
But so have my friend’s efforts to give children safe, clean water. Three years ago, we saw pictures of people in Niger, a country familiar to us in name only: photographs of mothers and children lying listlessly in their huts, or drinking fluid the consistency of strong coffee, contaminated with bacteria and toxins. I wrote about the situation; my friend, Laurel, eventually went to Niger.
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| © UNICEF/NYHQ2007-2654/Giacomo Pirozzi | |
| In Niger, thirteen-year-old Djamilia pours water into a jug in Safo Nassarawa Village in the region of Maradi. She'll carry the jug of water on her head to get it back home. |
Last Sunday morning, Laurel appeared on my radar again, safe and sound she said. Free of the ailments murky water brings (though some of the others in her group had suffered bouts of diarrhea) she returned from the Niger bush with a journal full of the things she had seen. Touring the village of Kijigari—an outpost of about 1,800 people in the middle of a barren region called the Azawak—she viewed site after site of former marshes where people dig holes up to 30 feet, then attach themselves with rope to descend into the earth, only to return with a small sack filled with dirty water. “Each excursion down to the depths of the Earth brings up a little more than a bowl of water, which they then, in most cases, toss into a small trough for their animals. Hundreds of animals wait for this dirty water, brought to them by sweaty boys, men, women. I wondered when they, themselves, would stop for a drink,” she wrote.
Further down her path, she saw circles in the sand, filled with cracked and dry earth, now off-limits for digging. In these spots, men who died in search of water are buried. “Before they were able to reach water, the sand fell in and suffocated them; each year, at least two or three people die this way—for water.” And a short while later, Laurel visited a well where women pull up water and fill large, yellow canisters. “As I flung the top half of my body over the edge of this well, however, I saw that, although deep, it was almost bone dry. As the driest, hottest season of all approaches, in April, May, June, where temperatures might reach 120 at midday, I saw that their water supply would dwindle, disappear.”
But where despair reigns, hope endures. My friend, Laurel, witnessed clues alluding to that hope—and UNICEF’s presence—almost everywhere. She saw UNICEF logos on school children’s notebooks, on pencils in the health clinic, and in front of two new boreholes. Indeed, over the past five years—since Democratic rule was restored to Niger—UNICEF has supplied essential vaccines, vitamin and nutrient supplements, and iron and oral rehydration salts for the treatment of preventable and water-borne illnesses, in addition to drilling wells and training local citizens to manage those wells. Niger has an estimated 2.5 billion cubic meters of underground renewable water, but only 20 percent is currently exploited, according to UNICEF statistics. There remains much to be done. Though I wish to someday do my part on the other side of the world, as Laurel has, for now I am driven to do what is in my power over here: raise money to help UNICEF find more water in places like Niger.
Comments (1)
my name is attaher mohamed, I am Laurel's friend. I am from azawak where people die because of the water.I experienced all that and have many parents and friends that die that way.people don't worry about the water they will wash their clothes,or water that would be use in the toilet but they worry mostly about the water each person would drink in a daily basis.I live in the States since 2005, I have all I need, but people i left behind still and will still in my mind.people suffer,one thing that shocked me whenever I think about was the Death of my mother at about 40 something, due to the hypertention because there is no medical center in the village,in addition to this, my young brother who was 10 years old that passed away due to malaria.this people need help.
Posted by attaher mohamed | March 30, 2009 6:04 PM
Posted on March 30, 2009 18:04