I am going to have a Geldorf moment, it is my first for a few months. I
think it's really in important, and I don't mean 'I think it's really
important' in a David Cameron 'I'll say anything is really important, just
as long as you vote for me' kind of a way. By all means ignore my rant and
come back in a few weeks when I've done some more outreach.
The chances are, as you read this, you are sitting fairly near a tap. And if
you were to get up and get a glass of water it would not cross your mind
that the water you are drinking could kill you.
Envisage for a moment that the water company decided one day to stop
supplying water to your house. (For those of you who pay vast sums of money
to Thames water every year for truly appalling service this won't require a
giant leap of imagination!)
Now picture a scene where, not only do you not get water to your home, but
not to the street where you live or even the distance between you and your
place of work.
And now imagine your nearest source of clean water is three hours walk away.
And you can't drive because there isn't a road. And even if there was, you
haven't got a car anyway. Part of the route involves crossing a swamp.
If you think this situation is bad, we haven't really started yet.
So the water pump is three hours away, and obviously it's not just you in
this predicament. So, you spend vast parts of your day either walking to the
pump or queuing to use it. You also need to carry the water you've collected
back, in a cracked, plastic container that splashes your precious clean
water across the countryside. Full, it could weigh up to twenty kilograms.
Oh, and did I mention that it's forty degrees in the midday sun?
However there is an alternative. Just near your house is a moderately sized
swamp. Obviously, the water isn't clean (in fact it's the swamp you use as a
toilet) but it's much easier to get to and you can get much water everyday.
So you decide to use this water instead. Dirty water is obviously not ideal,
and lo and behold your children become sick, and so do you. So your walk to
fetch water is punctuated by regular bouts of infective diarrhoea and
vomiting. Furthermore because you didn't get any type of formal education
you are completely unaware that it is the dirty water that is causing all
this.
In order to solve this problem you hear that the advice from the health
service (which consists of a single clinic two hours walk away) is to err.
drink more water.
If you live on planet earth you have a one in three chance of drinking water
from an unsafe source. That a situation like this should be the case in the
early twenty-first centaury should shame us all.
I'm away again tomorrow so no blog for a few weeks. Sorry that was all a bit
heavy. Go and have a glass of water.
