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.
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