When your finger slightly push the toilet flush, the amount of water that flush your toilet bowl is equal to a Somalian people consume for a day. And these people are walking up to 70km to search for that amount of water.
The easiness to access to water in our city make many of us around have neglected to appreciate this resources.
Transporting water from a far to help these unfortunate is much much harder than transporting foods. If we lost our water due to vapourisation and global warming. It will not be easy to get help from neighbouring countries.
maybebi said,
July 8, 2007 at 5:42 am
Wait, we can’t transport that water. That requires fuel. And fuel is bad!
I’d be a bit more impressed if you’d include the source of your information. That way your readers can see for themselves that what you say is true. Right now, how do we know? Do you think we will believe you just because it’s scary? or what?
Quah Yow Chun (Ji Yan) said,
July 25, 2007 at 3:00 pm
maybebi,
there are many articles on the internet about scacity of water in Africa. If a person wanna verify, just type water scacity and Somalia in google, you will find millions of matches about it. The are 40 billion work-hrs lost just for hauling water. The children are the victims paying the price for this.
One example of the link can be seen at here :
http://www.uneca.org/…/Mombassa%20Presentations/African%20Water%20Scarcity%20with%20a%20focus%20on%20Somalia.pdf
Orange said,
July 25, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Actually Google reports 48,600 matches.
I’m really impressed. The CIA Factbook reports that there are 9,118,773 Somalis (estimated from a 1975 census). “40 billion work-hrs lost” means an average of 4,386 work-hours lost per person. If you mean that as 40 billion hours per year, then each and every Somali is spending 12 hours a day hauling water – and that includes the children far too young to carry water, so it’s actually rather more than that for the grownups.
Can someone build them some pipes? Or help them build houses closer to the sources of water?
This isn’t meant to make light of their water problem, which I know is severe, or the other problems that the country faces – including civil war. (The children are victims of that, also.) But making up statistics isn’t going to help, as maybebi pointed out.
Finally did find the presentation you mentioned. That clears up the “40 billion work-hrs” bit, but introduces some new confusion. One slide (#3) says that “Water is not scarce in Horn of Africa”, and that available supplies are low because of “wars, mismanagement and lack of skilled manpower”. Another slide (#9) screams that “Hunger and death linger at the Horn because of wars and water scarcity!” A third (#15) suggests the solution: “The nation must put this to use by utilizing simple rainfall harvesting techniques.” Comments throughout indicate that a large part of the problem is poor sanitation, which renders much of the water unusable.
None of that indicates that Somalia is drying out because of Western flush toilets or global warming.
JiYan said,
July 27, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Orange, thanks for the calculation thru the CIA factbook, a good quick calculation, the figures of man hours lost from the report might be exaggerated. I do calculate with the estimated 3.4% growth rate, current population of Somalis could be around 12.3 Million in 2007.
[Ref : http://www.issafrica.org/AF/profiles/somalia/Table_Population.html
Imagine 80% of the population is adult that grown up and capable of carrying water. That will be 9.8 Millions population and assume 40 Billions hour lost is true. The hauling hours per head per day will be 8.9 hrs. That is still hard to believe but is only possible if everyone of them is working as water haulers. The report of 40 Billion from that presentation could be on whole Africa.
Walking up to 70 km can be seen from the story below :-
http://www.dose.ca/toronto/news/story.html?s_id=Jz2VYC6TIFszo09WxWoVkYehmFJMRsvRbozPa9E2fKNTZnE7vTAyhw%3D%3D