Women Walk for Water
The water crisis is a women’s crisis. I’ve said this countless times, repeating it while giving presentations at elementary schools, talking to donors, or posting on social media. It’s a fact I’ve mindlessly repeated whenever it nicely fit into conversation. Statistically speaking, it is estimated that women globally spend a collective 200 million hours a day securing water for their families. I knew this fact however, until this week, I didn’t know what the weight of these 200 million hours felt like.
In La Esperanza, a small community in the La Guajira district of Colombia’s northern, arid region, women and girls walk to the local well several times a day to fill large jugs with water. I’ll never forget my first day sitting by the well. I watched a young, skinny girl carefully place one of the filled jugs into a woven sling and like a CrossFit queen, swing it over her shoulder, onto her back, and bring the sling strap up to her forehead. With the grace of innumerable hours of practice, she marched home. I watched much younger girls and much older women repeat the same ritual the whole day through. I watched them walk away under its weight into the brush as they walked the desert paths home, up to a kilometer away. Then, a little while later, I would see them emerge out of the brush again returning for a refill. This cyclical journey was exclusively reserved for the women and girls of the community. And while they are responsible for most of the chores associated with caring for a family, this singular responsibility sequestered a particularly significant portion of waking available time.
On the second day, I was tired of watching. I asked one girl if I could help her carry the water jugs back to her home. She accepted my offer and, opting out of the forehead-sling, she helped me lift the insanely heavy container to my shoulder. With each sloshy step, I felt the real weight of the water crisis for the first time.
It took me 15 minutes to get to the girl’s house. As soon as she said, “Aqui.” I dropped the jug on the ground, sweating, out of breath, and on the verge of tears. This same girl didn’t walk to school 15 minutes away but spent hours a day walking back and forth for water. I wrestled mentally with the disparity. “How is it that I’m allowed to walk away not weighed down by water? Not thinking I would have to go back for another can, not worried at all about where my next drink of water would come from. Why was I given a weightless life? Free to pursue passions, talents and adventures. Why was this particular young girl stuck in this cycle? There’s no justifying the imbalance of this world.”
As a society, our innovations continue to push us towards greater time efficiency. We invent machines that clean for us, food that comes pre-cooked, and even apps that turn the lights off for us. We invent things to minimize the amount of time we spend doing tasks we don’t want to do in order to maximize the time we spend enjoying life or pursuing goals. Meanwhile, others around the world are spending hours just meeting their most basic needs, minimizing the time they spend enjoying life or pursuing goals.
The only way I can justify the imbalance is by thinking that maybe it’s up to us to redistribute some of this privileged time by using it to lighten the load for others.
