An opinion piece by Bethany Waugh
To many people, water mains coming from city supplies into homes and workplaces is a normal, overlooked daily function of a city. There are still many places where this is not an everyday reality.
It seems unthinkable to anyone who has grown up in a society where a seemingly unlimited supply of water comes out of the shower heads, the kitchen taps/faucets, and the toilet cistern that life without this would be even doable.
We cannot think what it would be like to take time out of our day to go and get water and bring it back. And even when a drought happens and we are mildly inconvenienced in this way, we still don’t think of this as anything more than a thing that should happen.
We, as societies, spend millions of dollars trying to ensure that every citizen in our community has access to clean water in their home daily.
I grant this is a noble pursuit, and I think the clean and drinkable part and the access part are very important.
But allow me to pose the question, how would societies where water mains coming into places of residence are not normal to feel if suddenly they had every piece of water infrastructure that, say, Auckland, New Zealand had?
We might speculate that these societies would be very thankful and that this infrastructure would save them a lot of daily toil and labour carting water from public wells or pumps.
We might guess there would be much rejoicing, and at the beginning, there certainly would be.
But, what we have not taken the time to consider in all our grandiose plans for giving the world better infrastructure is how much of these societies are built upon the daily collection of water – particularly for women.
If there is no longer any need to fetch water, a thriving hub of the community is removed.
Women gathering water share life advice with each other, older women instruct the younger women, and young girls learn what it is to be a woman in these communities. Songs are sung, oral history is passed, and lessons are learned.
Barbara Ann Perkins shares her experiences growing up in the Caribbean with the Tribune 242:
“Take a slow drive through any Over-the-Hill community and you will find a water pump. It’s a necessity in an area where there are still homes without infrastructure for running water. A well is a place where people come to connect and chat while drawing water, as it has been for thousands of years. In modern neighbourhoods, there is no well and without it, there is also a lost opportunity for people to get to know one another better on a daily basis. People stay indoors and have become more sedentary in lifestyle and less community-oriented in nature.”
Removing this vital community hub could potentially devastate the community and erode culture.
But yet, there is nothing wrong with a desire to put better infrastructure in place for communities such as the one that Barbara grew up in, right?
I think the solution is twofold—better access to drinkable water plus thriving community hubs. Without considering the cultural impact, no infrastructure engineer should ever plan to replace wells and pumps with mains to houses.
If the impact is considered in the planning, then solutions will be found to keep the community engaged with each other while still having more access to drinkable water.
I propose that all infrastructure planners in developing nations should have an anthropologist on hand with knowledge of the local people groups and their cultural needs to be weighed equally with their physical needs.
The people should be involved in the planning process because only they know what is essential for their culture and how the infrastructure could work with this and not against it.
Better access to drinkable water should never be at the expense of crucial societal activity.
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