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 >>