An American’a Water Shortage
By Sarah Stuteville
Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA —The water in our new house in Addis has been turned off for days and my back is so sore I’ve been squirming around on our dirty couches all evening begging for a position that doesn’t hurt.
Daily water collection in Ethiopia.
Photo by Alex Stonehill
It’s shameful how annoyed I am by the conjunction of these inconveniences given why I’m in Ethiopia at all. I’m here to research and write on water scarcity issues. In the past three days I’ve interviewed a woman whose son died of typhoid and a man who held four of his children as diarrhea from waterborne dysentery drained the life from their small bodies. I watched an old woman fall to her knees and kiss the ground in thanks of water.
I’m annoyed by the sputtering and empty pipes in my rented house because I haven’t showered in four days.
My back hurts because, as an experience, I volunteered along with other Seattleites here to witness water development programs, to help build the concrete platform for a community water spigot in impoverished rural Oromia.
In total, I spent maybe, maybe 3 hours hauling concrete and water in busted, leaking buckets on my back. As a result my spine feels permanently compacted. I’m convinced in my self-pity that I can actually feel the vertebrae rubbing against each other somewhere in the curve of my back.
Yesterday, I watched—taking notes and directing a cameraman—as a middle-aged rural Ethiopian villager secured three plastic buckets of dirty water onto her small frame, preparing to haul them kilometers back to her hut, where if it isn’t boiled properly it may poison her family… Continue reading >>
8 thoughts on “American researcher describes the obscene poverty in Ethiopia”
Sarah,
If the objective of your research is to find out why these people are poor, do not look further than the World Bank-financed dictators who are ruling the country. Ethiopians are hard working people, but unfortunately there are a successive parasatic government that kept the people subjugated and illitrate while plundering the country’s resources.
what could meles and co.learn from tiny eritrea which has been hailed by WHO in its provision of efficient health services and clean water to majority of its population? what is the point of counting GDP growth percentage where the wealth created is so skewed while the mass is suffering of curable diseases?
Well said Adera! Dictator Meles gets his sophisticated military weapons from the Bush administration with which he kills innocent Ethiopians. Even worse, the Bush administration keeps turning a blind eye to excesses of basic basic human rights violations in Ethioia. It is opposing HR2003!!
Thanks Sarah for your comment! I couldn´t have said it better myself.
Sarah,
What are you researching, your weakness unable to carry a bucket of water?! About your discomfort because you haven’t taken a shower for four days? Is that why you flew all the way to Africa to tell your story? I thought you are a volunteer to share the lives of the host people to improve the standards, if any.
Why did this woman go there in the first place? It looks she is complaining too much about a well-known living condition there. Her thought process may be laced with some poisonous presumptions. For lack of foresights by its cursed children, this country was deemed to suffer unabated for some time in the past and if this stupendous bickering among its enlightened intellectuals does not come to a compromising conclusion, it will continue to go through the same agony for centuries to come. Her children know more about the use of guns than the utilization of their academic achievements.
There is no word to explain the poverty in Ethiopia. Thanks for our savage and heartless leaders, our people living without any vision and hope.
Yes indeed,problems become an execellent opportunity to find out the solution.
But, One thing we have to remember: In the time of starvation there is no contamination ” My late Grand mother said:” Thank you sarah, for pointing outour problem become serious basic necessities who are seeking food and God given water. Do the westners know such a problems or not? Ps. Email to their embassy if they can help for such common problems? Thank you. [email protected]