Saturday, November 08, 2014

In a land without clean water, corruption is bleeding Zimbabwe dry...

In the darkness before dawn, the people of Mabvuku trudge to the nearest borehole and place their buckets in a line. It will take many hours of patient queuing before they can get the water they need for their daily survival.

At home, their taps have been dry for more than four years. As Zimbabwe’s crisis continues, the daily struggle for water is exhausting. It’s a symptom of a collapsing state, where political infighting and corruption are keeping its people in poverty and misery.

“We were expecting that one day our taps would work, but there’s nothing,” says Tobias Gumboreshumba, a resident of this low-income suburb on the outskirts of Harare.

“We’re getting tired now. It really hurts. All of our brains are spent on where and how are we going to get water today. It’s stressing us very much.”

The 56-year-old grocery-warehouse supervisor had been helping his wife queue for water since 3 a.m., and after six hours they were still waiting.

His family, and three neighbouring families, have 46 buckets that they need to fill every day. They take turns in the queue, moving a bucket forward to hold their place. But the borehole is more than 25-metres deep, the water from the pump is barely a trickle, and it takes a lot of pumping to fill the buckets. Fights sometimes erupt among the frustrated people in the queue. Full story...

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