Social Icons

Friday 19 May 2017

#AFRICANEWS : A day in the life of Juba's bicycle water vendors




Sam, a water vendor from Uganda, secures jerrycans of water onto his bicycle

Sofia Barbarani

Juba, South Sudan - By 10am, the unforgiving morning sun begins to beat down on the dusty streets and mud huts of Hai Gabat, a neighbourhood in the east of Juba, South Sudan's capital.
Sam, a 45-year-old water seller from Uganda, has been up for four hours. He is busy securing the last of six jerrycans on to the rusty frame of his old, heavy bicycle.
Around him women, children and men gather beneath the sprawling boughs of a leafy tree, seeking shelter from the sun and filling dozens of yellow jerrycans with running tap water.
The cluster of taps is one of Juba's two UNICEF-installed water points, where water from the River Nile is treated with aluminum sulfate and chlorine before some 50,000 litres are pumped out daily for private and commercial use.
This small oasis offers a source of potable water in a city where access to safe water isn't readily available. Only 15 percent of Juba's residents are able to access municipal water. Much of the population is left vulnerable to waterborne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and the Guinea worm disease.
According to the United Nations, water scarcity affects more than 40 percent of the global population with 1.8 billion people worldwide drinking water that is fecally contaminated and some 1,000 children dying each day from preventable water and sanitation-related diseases.

[Sofia Barbarani/Al Jazeera]

No comments: