Water And Conflict

Water, Anger, Desperation -- Washington Times

Cairo's millions struggle to find something clean to drink

The women line up at a well, jugs in hand and on their heads, to draw water. It is a pastoral scene celebrated in paintings and Middle Eastern lore from ancient times.

Bloomberg News photographs Women and children cope with a shortage of clean water and the absence of a municipal water system by gathering potable water in the Saft al-Laban neighborhood of Cairo and taking it to their homes.

This tableau, however, is in a treeless alley in 21st-century Cairo, the largest city in Africa. As the Nile River flows by abundantly just four miles to the east, residents in the Saft al-Laban neighborhood carry out a ritual of desperation, not tradition.

Women wait to fill containers with potable water from a hose in the Saft al-Laban neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2008. Water shortages, both for drinking and for irrigation, are increasing throughout Egypt. Photographer: Victoria Hazou/Bloomberg News

Forty percent of Cairo's 17 million inhabitants get drinking water for no more than three hours a day, according to the Egyptian government's National Research Center. At least four large districts receive no water at all from the municipal system, including a swath of Saft al-Laban, home to 100,000 people.

"They act as if we are not here, as if we were not part of the city and deserved to live like animals in the desert," said Ferial Abdel-Hafiz, 42, a mother of seven children who wandered the neighborhood on a recent early morning searching for water.

She is among the victims of a government failure to provide a key service in areas that grew up helter-skelter during 40 years of migration by rural folks seeking jobs.

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My Comment: Water will be one of those resources that people will be fighting for in the future. Pollution, climate impact and change, greater industrial need for water .... all of these factors will force governments and peoples to make hard decisions.

Thank God I live in Canada.