What Oxfam is Doing
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WATER AND PEACE
Access to nearby clean water has changed thousands of people's lives.
Zerai is a 36 year old father of four. For the last two and half years he has been looking after a dam and nearby well in the remote southern highlands of Eritrea. When Oxfam visited his village Dabre, he explained how access to nearby clean water has changed his and thousands of people's lives.
"Before Oxfam came, our mothers and sisters would walk for three or four hours each way to get water from the valley. Sometimes they faced queues of hours, or even waited overnight for their turn, but still only got one jerrycan of water in the end."
Never enough water
A single jerrycan that girls and women lugged back up the steep rocky escarpment carried only 20 litres of precious water.
There was never enough. For a family of ten, 20 litres barely lasted a couple of day's worth of washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking. Even in an emergency people should have a minimum of 15 litres for general use and three for consumption per day.
Oxfam funds a dam
In mid-2003, we began working with the people in Dabre village to build a dam nearby.
The dam collects water during the rainy season for use in the dry months. Sometimes it goes eight months without any rain at all.
Slightly downhill from the dam Oxfam's engineers helped the villagers to dig a well. The hand-dug well can absorb water from the surrounding soil because of normal seepage from the dam. Today, even in the driest months of April and May, there's always water.
Water is everything When asked if things in Dabre were different since the dam was dug, Zerai looked perplexed, "I don't know how I could begin to explain everything that's changed. Water is everything."
Before, there was so little water available that there wasn't enough left over to share with the old or sick who couldn't fetch water themselves. "Old people had to beg for a cup of water" remembered Zerai. "Today, mothers have more free time."
Abraham, an 11-year-old boy fetching water for his mother, interrupted, "It's not just that we don't have to do the long and difficult walk, the best part is not having to wait for hours."
Genuine peace essential
Despite the obvious improvements, Zerai warned that water is still rationed. "We need to terrace the land and plant trees to conserve the water". But like dozens of other villages, Dabre doesn't have enough young people for the much needed manual labour.
Because of the seemingly intractable "No Peace, No War" situation between Eritrea and Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of young people are away doing obligatory national service. For them and their families, normal life is still on hold.
Although the last war that killed 70,000 people ended in 2000, many Eritrean and Ethiopian people are still waiting to reap the benefits of a genuine peace. When the long-awaited peace finally arrives villagers in places like Dabre will finally be able to get on with their lives and Zerai will be able to get help planting the trees that will help conserve the soil.
