Women, Water and Anger

I came to Kenya knowing all about it. I found out about it many years ago. It rocked my world, and it made me cry. I face it every day. I look at the situation and force myself to hope, even when it seems impossible. I hold back my own emotions in order to prevent shame, because they have enough hardship and they don’t need me making them feel bad about their lives, their courageous lives.

I'm talking about women, and their water burden. Here in Kenya, and all over Africa, women and girls carry the burden of water collection. Their daily lives literally revolve around it. They often have to walk long distances to reach a water sources, on average about an hour there and back. And they have to do this several times a day, 3 times on average.

If you add it all up, that’s about 20 hours a week spent on water collection.

And that doesn’t even include treatment and storage that has to be done in the home to keep the water safe. Interestingly that’s the time commitment required for a part time job. It makes sense that water collection duties are keeping girls out of school and keeping women from keeping jobs and earning money for their families.

If you’re a girl in charge of collecting water for your household, your choices in life are greatly limited. Your choices are limited, because your family needs to quench their thirst, wash their bodies and clean the dishes. In the Western world we rely on others working behind the scenes to make all of this easy for us by bringing water to our taps and showers. And all the treatment stuff- most of us aren’t even aware it is happening at all. Women are doing all of this by themselves in their homes.

And, during times of drought when water sources dry up, women are forced to walk even greater distances and wait even longer in lines. In one area here, women reported waiting 6 hours and having to get to their water source by 4 a.m.

This past week, this made me angry. I know all about the crisis, but still, I was moved to tears. It’s not ok with me that many women in this community can’t even sign their own names, that as little girls, instead of going to school they got to be water maids. It’s not ok with me that tiny little girls are robbed of their childhoods, hiking up steep embankments all day barefoot with heavy buckets on their heads. I may have blogged these very same words before, but the truth is, if I was born here I could have been one of those girls.

It’s the anger that fuels me sometimes; it keeps me working late into the night, investing in local leaders, and pursuing partnerships and projects that sometimes seem audacious. I do it for these women and for these girls, and I'll keep at it until they get clean water, at a reasonable walking distance from their homes.