This article was about how people in the town of Konso, Ethiopia don’t have the resources and access to clean drinking water. A woman named Aylito Binayo is one of many who travel down the mountain in order to get water three to five times a day. They may wait hours to get water after a long many hour journey. In this country, women are not able to get an education due to their responsibilities of taking care of the children, getting water, and cleaning their living spaces. According to society expectations, women who “sit and stay at home and do nothing, nobody likes. But if they run up and down to get water, they say she is a clever woman and works hard."
An organization called WaterAid is trying to help give clean, fresh water to poorer places like Konso where clean water is scarce. Other organizations have come to help places like this by providing water resources, but only a few lasted. The ones that didn’t last were either too difficult to fix or people didn’t trust another person with their money in order to buy another part for the resource. When Aylito was asked to imagine an easier life and what she would do, she said “she will go the fields to help her husband, collect grass for the goats, make food for her family, clean the living space, and be with her sons, instead of leaving a grave little four-year-old in charge of his younger brothers for hours on end.” Her hopes for her family’s better life was “to get through the new hunger brought on by the drought, to get through this new wave of disease--to scramble back to the meager life she had known before. She doesn't dream. She has never dared think that someday life could change for the better--that there could arrive a metal spigot, out of the end of which gushed dignity.”
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