World Water Week

Water is a resource and has a value, which is the reason that someone designated 23 – 28 August 2015 as World Water Week. Not that the week has been overly celebrated – I have seen no reference to it in the local media.

Our water tank holds just over 5400 litres and I wasted half of it last night by forgetting to turn the tap off that fills a water trough for my sheep! ‘Wasted’ is not quite the right word because quite quickly the water will find its way to the river or evaporate to form clouds which will eventually turn to rain. Cycle complete.

The wastage is the power resource, in our case hydro-electricity, to pump the water from the river to the reservoir serving our small community.

The list of water related problems is as long as your arm!

Bore-water is now being used more extensively (and deeper) for agriculture and the underground water table (aquifer) takes 1400 years to replenish! Presumably there is a limit to the amount of groundwater that can be taken, and perhaps we are a long way from that point, but if the water is no longer stored underground, where will it go? A guess is it will cause more clouds/rainfall and fill the rivers and sea just a little bit more – a change in the balance.

There are important water statistics. Men are 60% water and women 55%. 70% of the earth’s surface is water and 2.5% of the water is ‘fresh’. Not much for the fresh water is drinkable and in the developed world the water supplies are treated for safe drinking, even though more of it is flushed down the toilet than actually drunk!

The inequity is that in developed countries, water usage per person is 300 – 600 litres, while in for example, Sub-Saharan Africa water usage is 10 – 40 litres per person.

We all know teenagers spend far too long in the shower and who turns the tap off between rinses and scrubbing their teeth? Good clean water running into the sewer!

At Mti Moja, families share the water in a muddy pond with cattle, donkeys and goats – the livestock urinate and defecate in the water that the families drink and cook with.

The women of Ilkirimuni walk with their donkeys to carry water that comes from a spring some 14 kilometres distant.

Piped water runs so slowly that women suck the water from the pipe and spit it into their buckets.

At many villages piped water runs for only a short period each day, the queue may be 40 people with buckets or drums and there are always some who go home empty bucketed.

There are those who think not of their fellow man. A boarding secondary school unwilling to invest properly in water reticulation allows students to bathe in a nearby creek – at the very source where a clean spring emerges from the ground. Downstream uses have to put up with soapy water (plus other matter) for household use!

Expats use water tankers to dampen road dust while further up the hill there is no water to be had so ferried water is purchased at the expense of household food supplies.

Piped water is stolen by farmers for irrigation of crops causing downland households to be without clean drinking water.

Remember those massive oil spills? Put into perspective they cover only a tiny percentage of the seas and coastlines – even so, though they are disastrous and generate widespread protest.

Some eight million tonne of waste plastic ends up in the oceans of the world each year with the probability that the tonnage will increase.

We are not on this planet alone, so we all have a responsibility to protect it.

Apparently the United States, Germany, France and China are the top plastic producers and it is the developing countries that cause the most pollution. Question the culpability.

As a lad, I was told that water in a stream running over gravels after travelling just one chain – that’s twenty metres – purifies itself. The statement is plainly absurd but statements like this justified polluting the rivers and oceans with garbage and sewage!

Today the lessons haven’t sunk in – despite some obvious improvements, the population surge brings with it uncontrollable waste.

There are dedicated people who care about world water and there some who perhaps go a little too far, but the average person on the street will only care if water doesn’t come out of their tap, or if it is discoloured.

Small things en masse will help, such as proper disposal of plastics (including disposable baby stuff), care with chemicals (sprays, soaps, shampoos and cleaning products) and flush only body waste into the sewer.

A little thought will go a long way!