The Silent Cry of Water

THE WATER SPURTING out of the tap was murky and contaminated. I'm not sure what bugs were swimming around in it, but they had to go before I could consider using it for cooking or drinking. The liquid was boiled in a saucepan for ten minutes, and then filtered twice before the colourless and 'safe' water was bottled and stored in the fridge. Even then, I added a water purification tablet to it, just to be on the safe side.
My husband and I lived in Northern Nigeria in the early 1980s as lay missionaries, and this was an everyday ritual. Mind you, we were lucky to have a tap at our home - three, in fact. The majority of people in the city of Kaduna didn't. Every day children walking to school or the church from a shanty town a mile away would linger at our outside tap to drink and to play with the water. You could hear their laughter as they flicked droplets at each other in the scorching heat. I remember how surprised we were, the night before we left Nigeria, when local people said that what they would remember about us was letting the children use our tap. It had cost us nothing, but the children were delighted to have access to the water - even brown and unhealthy as it was. Water brings life, and the children's joy has always reminded me of how precious a resource it is.

Access to Water

Although it is apparent from outer space that we live on a blue planet, 98 percent of that water is salty and undrinkable. Less than half of the rest is available for human consumption, since most fresh water is locked in the polar ice caps, snow and glaciers. Access to that limited fresh water is very unequal, and there is now no chance that the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people without access to clean water by 2015 will be met. One third of the world's population now lives in water-stress areas. In Mexico City, for example, Latin America's largest metropolis, with more than 20 million people, the underground aquifers are collapsing and the city is sinking. Rich people buy bottled water and the poor purchase it by the bucketful from water tankers. It is estimated that by 2030, some 2 billion people will live in illegal squatter settlements and slums without access to water. In Africa, the average woman walks five miles a day fetching water from sources that are becoming less secure as the years pass. Also, water quality is declining in most regions. Water-borne diseases are responsible for 80 percent of illnesses and deaths in poor countries from diseases such as typhoid, malaria, dengue, and cholera. Organic waste and sewage is also a source of many health problems, especially in poor countries.

Catholic stewardship

Catholic leaders are becoming increasingly involved in the issue of water. In 2001, the Columbia River in North America was the focus of a pastoral letter by 12 Catholic bishops who wanted to play their part in protecting it for future generations. They described the rivers and its environs as a 'sacramental watershed', and complained about it being used for the dumping of waste. The stewardship of water for the common good is moving up the priorities of Christians concerned with justice, peace and human rights. Last September, for instance, a Brazilian bishop went on a hunger strike protesting plans to divert water from the Sao Francisco river. He complained that the plans would divert water away from local communities to agro-industrial projects elsewhere.
Access to clean water is not just an environmental issue and a development issue, it is also a matter of human rights and a moral issue. Since all life depends on it, water plays an important role in the Christian faith. Baptising with water - presumably clean water - is a sign of new life and entry into the community of Jesus. Water was important in Jesus' teaching mission. The incident with the Samaritan woman at the well in St John's Gospel afforded Jesus the opportunity to present his life-giving message for all people. 'Whoever drinks this water will thirst again; but anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again: the water I shall give will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life'. (Jn 4:14)
At the World Water Forum in Mexico during March 2006, many were surprised that some representatives of the world's big multilateral institutions appeared to deny that water is a human right. 'The right of water is not relevant to this forum,' the World Bank's Jamal Shagir told the press. Fortunately, the Vatican's statement to the Forum defended the right of all to water, 'The human right of access to safe water and sanitation must be promoted in such a way that existing inequalities are reduced to the greater well-being of the least advantaged'. The facts and figures of the inequalities in the world are stark. According to the International Development Initiative of McGill University, Canada, and the Saint Paul Water Utility, Minnesota, USA, the average North American family uses 350 litres of water a day. The average European family uses about half that - 165 litres a day - while in sub-Saharan Africa the average is 10 to 20 litres.

Not just a commodity

Water is increasingly being seen as a tradeable commodity and a source of profit, which is depriving the poorest of one of the essentials of life. Water privatisation is one trend of recent decades that is causing strife in the South. Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva suggests that the prevailing market paradigm does not look at the water cycle, but begins with finance and looks at how to extract water as a raw material and use it to generate cash. 'When you function in an ecological paradigm you value water, but you don't price it, because it is in fact priceless,' she says. 'In a market paradigm you price water, but you don't value it'.
In May 2000 Fortune Magazine stated that 'Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century - the precious commodity which determines the wealth of nations. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have made water privatisation a condition for receiving new loans, especially in Africa. According to Curtis Runyan of WorldWatch, 'privatisation schemes around the world have resulted in drastic rate increases, significant job cuts, few environmental safeguards, dropped conservation initiatives and halted services to the poor and remote communities'.

Power of the downtrodden

In 2000, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba saw protests, and even riots, when a US-based transnational company took over management of the water system and immediately raised the price of water by 300 percent. Tens of thousands of indigenous people and shanty town dwellers camped out in the city's plaza for a month until the Bechtel Group finally gave up. In 2005, new conflicts arose in the cities of El Alto and La Paz. The Suez water company's contract in El Alto did not oblige it to provide water to poor neighbourhoods where there were not already existing mains and pipes. For tens of thousands of people within the 'service area' the new price was unaffordable. A potable water connection and a sewerage connection cost about $470, in a country where the minimum wage, for those lucky enough to be working in the formal economy, was around $64 a month. 'The struggle in defence of our water showed us the power of those down below,' said Oscar Oliveira, a leader of the Cochabamba protest movement. 'We must be vigilant of those who would make water into a merchandise,' he added, 'for water is a fundamental human right'.

Mega water projects

Another key problem has been mega water projects which are designed and implemented very often without consultation with local communities. The Narmada Project in India, for example, financed by the World Bank, has involved the construction of 30 big dams, and about 300 small ones, on the Narmada River. The giant dams are built with huge earth-moving equipment, and that's where the problem starts because this really disrupts the water cycle. Also, water is diverted away from small-scale agriculture to serve water-guzzling industrial agriculture and the water needs of big towns. Areas that were formerly getting water through the rivers and wells that were being re-charged by that river, and the fisheries that were being supported by that river, are killed, and that cost is never taken into account. Millions of indigenous people have been displaced and their traditional methods of harvesting water completely disregarded.
Civil society organisations and church groups are mobilising in Chile and Argentina against a giant mining project of the Canadian transnational Barrick Gold that calls for the removal of three Andean glaciers which cover substantial gold and silver deposits. Melt waters from the glaciers currently sustain the ecosystem of the high mountain and of the whole valley, and local communities fear that their fertile agricultural valley will be sacrificed. The glaciers currently supply irrigation water for some 70,000 farmers. Andean glaciers, one of the Earth's important reserves of freshwater, are already suffering a sharp decline as a result of global warming. In this case, the removal of 20 hectares of ice as part of the Pascua-Lama project - with a volume of 300,000 to 800,000 cubic meters of ice - would cause serious environmental harm. ''Water is worth more than gold,' says Lucio Cuenca, the Chilean coordinator of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts. 'The Pascua-Lama project is a brutal example of the type of economic development Chile is carrying out''.

Disrupted water cycles
 
Water is diminishing for other reasons too. Global warming is drying lands and reducing rainfall. In the Matabeleland area of Zimbabwe, for instance, there is far less rain than there used to be. 'There has been the biggest climate change within living memory,' according to Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, 'and the rainy season which used to run from October to April, now starts around mid-November and ends in February'. Food production and availability of water for drinking, washing and agriculture has been reduced.
Deforestation has a major impact on water availability, soil erosion, pollution in rivers and groundwater, and an overall loss of available fresh water. Large forests are their own eco-systems, and demonstrate the purification systems and life-cycles of water. In Zambia, the Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter in 2004 deploring that 'we have not taken the best care for this environment on which we depend for our survival'. The letter identifies 'massive deforestation' as a key problem, and blames it on the ever increasing need for fuel wood. The bishops say that poor communities' lack of access to electricity has encouraged charcoal burning. Wangari Maathai founded the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya in the 1970s to reforest the land. In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2004, she spoke about growing up in a very green environment near a small stream. Her family drank water straight from the stream. When she returned home after studying overseas for several years she found the stream had dried up and the surrounding trees were gone. 'If trees are cut down, or vegetation removed from the ground, when the rains come the water does not go into the ground to replenish the underground reservoirs,' she said, 'instead, water runs off and goes into the streams and lakes and oceans, and carries with it our good, fertile topsoil'. She urged that water be respected and used wisely, 'even when it comes to us through the tap'.

Water Wars

Conflicts over water are increasing. Access to water has been a major problem in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. There is potential tension between Pakistan and India over access to the waters of the Indus, and a similar situation between India and Bangladesh over tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. In 1999 Ismail Serageldin of the World Bank predicted that the wars of the 21st century will be about water.
Caring for water globally and locally is a major ethical and religious challenge for Christians today. There is an onus on each local Christian community to respect water, and to do all in its power to ensure that water remains living and unpolluted, and that it continues to be a source of life for all creation. With Saint Francis we ought to be able to say, 'Praise to You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste'.