The Woman Who Carries Water Essay, Research Paper

More than twenty million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of dying from starvation due the drought. In Ethiopia, each year as many as 250,000 children die from hunger and malnutrition. In 1994, the country faced a total collapse of its infrastructure. More than eighty percent of the population lived off the land. Harvests of crops such as maize and groundnuts were largely gone, and thousands of cattle and other livestock had been parched with thirst. Also, most of the natural springs had dried up. However, people from all around the globe either pleaded ignorance or said, It is none of my responsibility. But we are all brothers one of another, so we are obliged in conscience to help each other. I d forgotten that I had even taken the Ethiopian volunteer recruitment test when that call came on a cold January day in 1994. Then, standing in a battered wooden telephone booth in my military quarters in Cologne, Germany, I heard someone say, Congratulations. You ve been accepted. Finally, I was a volunteer in Ethiopia.

During a period of six weeks, we built up new artesian well pumps 200 kilometers southwest of Djibouti. It was no typical dry season, but the continued aridness had left its mark in this region. Pump water, everyone knows, is clean. Drinking well water will make one sick. Every month, people there die from diarrhea and dehydration. The pump is also where one hears gossip from the women who live on the other side of the village. This trip to the pump may be one s only excuse for going outside of one s Muslim home alone.

I will always remember the sight of women going to the pumps for water. When a woman carried water on her head, you could see her neck bend outward behind her like a crossbow. Ten liters of water weighs around twenty-two pounds, a fifth of a woman s body weight, and I ve seen women carry at least twenty liters in aluminum pots large enough to hold a television set. To get the water from the cement floor surrounding the outdoor hand pump to the top of your head, one needs help from the other women. The other women grab the pot s edges and help lift it straight up. When it is at head height, one ducks underneath the pot and places it on the wad of rolled-up cloth always worn when fetching water. This is the cushion between one s skull and the metal pot full of water. Then the others let go. When a woman finds her balance under forty pounds of water, I see her eyes roll to the corners in concentration. Her head makes the small movements of the hands of someone driving a car: constant correction. The biggest challenge is to turn all the way around from the pump to go home again. It is a small portion of the ocean, and it swirls and lurches on her head with her slow movements. You spend a few seconds finding your balance. Then with one hand steadying the load, turn around and start your way home. It might be a twenty-minute walk through mud huts and donkey manure. All of this is done without words. It is an action repeated so many times during the day that even though I have never carried water on my head, I know exactly how it is done. Do not worry that no one will be at the pump to help you. The pump is the only source of clean drinking water for the village of three thousand people. Your family, your husband and children rely on the water on your head; maybe ten people will drink the water you carry. It looks painful and complicated and horrible for the posture and unhealthy for the vertebrae, but I wish I could do it.

I have volunteered in this East African village for six weeks, but cannot even balance something solid, like a mango, on my head, let alone a pot filled with liquid. When I lug my ten liter plastic jug of water to my house by hand, it is only a hundred meters, but the container is heavy and unwieldy. Changing the jug from one hand to the other helps, but it is a change necessary every twenty meters. Handles do not balance. On your head, the water is symmetrical like the star on top of a Christmas tree. Because my life has never depended on it, I have never learned to balance. What I do know is that the whole experience made me adventurous and eager for more. For more culture, more countries, more languages, more roads and vistas, more smells, sounds, and experiences, beyond those of my own country. My time in Ethiopia and my knowledge in the Air Force gave me a perspective from which to understand attitudes toward time, to appreciate the slowness of the Ethiopian people, and to understand that there is more than one right way to do things, including carrying water. It was a heady invitation, asking not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country. Here was something I could do.