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Consequences of Inaccessible Water in Haiti - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...ces-of-inaccessible-water.html

Haiti water sanitation environmental_education statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Water has been identified as a top priority for aid to Haiti as it struggles to recover. The consequences of not having access to water extend beyond dehydration. Thirst drives people to water sources they would not have considered before - sources contaminated with human waste, garbage, and industrial byproducts. Using this water leads to diseases like cholera and dysentery, which spread rapidly through communities. Aid efforts must place a priority on bringing safe water to Haiti as soon as possible if the country is to quickly move beyond the immediate crisis to long-term recovery efforts.
  • Providing water to Haiti has been troublesome for decades. According to the World Health Organization, only 58% of Haitians had sustainable access to clean water in 2006.
  • Steve Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization, suggests in a New York Times editorial that Haiti focus on local water networks with flexible piping that can be buried and repaired easily.
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  • The tragedy in Haiti has brought to light the consequences of not having access to clean water. Across the globe, 1.1 billion people do not have access to reliable, clean water and 2.6 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.
Teachers Without Borders

Yemen's Water Woes - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...yemens_water_woes.html

Yemen water environmental_education depletion natural_resources

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • water crisis threatens Yemen’s long-term stability.
  • But environmental problems don’t always make for exciting news stories, and amongst the plethora of threats to Yemen’s stability, the water crisis is often lost in the background.
  • Water resources are being rapidly depleted in many countries around the world, including the western United States, and access to clean water is a common problem through out the developing world. But even in the context of worldwide fresh water depletion, Yemen’s crisis is staggering: Yemenis use about a fifth of the amount of water recommended by the World Health Organization for healthy and hygienic living; the capital, Sana’a, may be the first world capital to run out of its own water supplies; and thousand-meter wells have recently been drilled in the country’s highlands to get at so-called “fossil water.”
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  • But anyone who spends some amount of time in Yemen sees pretty clearly the daily impact that the lack of water has on people. Tanker trucks trundle down the streets of the cities carrying groundwater from deep wells drilled in the countryside; families use and reuse water for washing three or four times, and children wander the streets with buckets of water collected from the publics spigots of mosques. On a drive through the mountainous countryside at anytime of day, but especially in the morning, you see dozens of women and children walking down the main roads with donkeys and cans, on their way to find water, and you must imagine the hundreds of thousands of people across the country that spend hours each day on the same search.
  • As one foreign water expert put it to me, there won’t be an hour, or a day or even a year when Yemen runs out of water; it won’t be a headline-making disaster, but it will be disastrous.
Teachers Without Borders

India: The Open Defecation Paradox - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

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water_crisis water sanitation developing nations India toilets

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.
  • Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.
  • India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.
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  • For example, NGOs can produce statistics indicating that more households in India have cell phones and television than access to toilets. But for rural people to want to put in toilets, they have to be informed.
Teachers Without Borders

Helium Quest: Answers to a Water Crisis - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...answers-to-a-water-crisis.html

water water_day sanitation developing nations water_crisis

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Unsafe water and poor sanitation claim 4,500 lives day. What should we do about it?
  • On Monday, March 22, World Water Day celebrates its 17th year of publicizing water issues with the theme “Clean Water for a Healthy World.” Our Global Issues/Citizen Voices essay contest highlights this theme with hopes of prolonging the conversation. From entrants detailing first-hand accounts of how the lack of access to clean water has affected the lives of their families and communities to policy-based analyses of the issues and solutions, the participants consider a range of points, each adding a unique perspective to the dialogue.
  • Yet 1.1 billion people continue to live without access to reliable sources of clean water.
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