In Darfur, water isn’t everywhere
By Coco McCabe, , The Boston Globe
EL FASHER, Nov 20, 2004 — Under a blistering sun at Dalih camp, the sheik minced no words: His people are suffering a shortage of water. One tanker load a day is not enough, he said, as a crowd of homeless people pressed around him, their faces lined with worry and beaded with sweat, their shelters of brambles and cardboard offering little protection from the heat and sun. The day before, he said, two children had died. Sunstroke killed one; diarrhea the other.
On a recent visit to Darfur, the conflict-torn region of western Sudan, I couldn’t shake the sheik’s plea. It was water I kept thinking about: how hard it is to get, how easy it is to spoil, life-nourishing if it’s clean and life-threatening if it’s dirty, and how quickly it can push whole communities, packed into makeshift camps, from one condition to the other with just a few sips.
In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, red dust, whipped up by the wind, tints the sky a faint orange and settles in a fine coat on every surface. The Darfur dust is a tip-off. This is a place where rain, when it falls, soaks the earth briefly and disappears. Water is precious. In the intense heat, it feels like you can never get enough and what you drink seems to evaporate right through your pores.
At Zam Zam, a camp for some of the 1.4 million people driven from their homes, a small girl sits with her feet soaking in a shallow pool made by damming the runoff from the community water tap a few feet away. The pool is murky, but a relief from the heat of the sand that prickles through the soles of the cracked flipflops the children wear. She’s in her own world for a moment — until someone shoos her away. This water, covered in a film dust, is too valuable for such luxuries as cooling scorched feet. A vegetable patch, with thin green plants striving to stand in the sun, needs the runoff more than a hot little girl does. A narrow channel from the pool drains into the vegetables. They look limp and tired. Will they survive, I wonder? Will she?
Waterborne illnesses are one of the major threats Darfur’s residents face in the crowded camps that dot their homeland. They can kill swiftly and massively. High rates of hepatitis E have been reported throughout the region. The threat of a cholera epidemic hangs heavily over the temporary settlements.
At Abu Shouk, where 49,000 people are now camped on a sweltering plain, the delicate balance between life and death tipped dangerously to the latter a few months ago when an outbreak of diarrhea rippled through the camp. Children were dying and health clinics saw a doubling of patients. Contaminated jerry cans — the big jugs people haul and store water in — appeared to be the culprit. Aid workers from Oxfam undertook a monumental cleaning effort, overseeing the scrubbing of 15,000 storage jugs with a chlorine solution. Within a week, new cases of diarrhea had been cut in half.
In Darfur, water means work — fetching it, keeping it clean, lugging it to the latrines and bathing stalls. In the sprawling tent cities, there is no municipal system delivering a fresh supply to each home as there is in the United States, where the average person uses nearly 90 gallons a day. Instead, at central delivery points, water gets sloshed into jugs and bladders and ported back to shelters on the rumps of donkeys or balanced, with spine-crunching weight, on the tops of women’s heads. In emergencies like this, aid agencies try to provide a minimum daily water allotment for drinking, cooking and cleaning that is just shy of four gallons per person — less than three flushes of an average American toilet. Still, hauling even this small amount takes time, and the lines at water points can sometimes be long.
The burden of waiting for water in the hot sun is a godsend compared with having none at all. In Darfur, water has become a weapon of war: There are reports of village wells’ being stuffed with human corpses and dead animals, ruining the water supply for whoever is left — or had hoped to return.
From the window of a helicopter flying low between El Fasher and the town of Kebkabiya, I can see an occasional village rising from the dusty earth, the family compounds surrounded by walls that look like wobbly lines from above. Each village is a surprise. How can anyone survive in such arid emptiness? The land here is not hospitable, and it’s only the limited water from the village wells that must make living tolerable. In this parched place, poisoned water is one of the cruelest outcomes of the conflict that has destroyed so many lives and livelihoods since early 2003.
Back at Abu Shouk, I snap a picture of a boy balancing a watermelon on his shoulder. Perhaps he got it at the market in nearby El Fasher. He is smiling faintly. Is it in anticipation of cutting his melon open to get at the fruit that is thirst-quenching like no other? Maybe. But maybe, too, it is the smile of a boy with a well of resilience that has not yet run dry during these months of misery. I hope that’s so.
Coco McCabe is a media and information officer for Oxfam America.