Safe Water Transport
89
Women and men talk about water
When the water committee
in a small Mexican
village planned to pipe
water to the village
from a large spring,
they decided they
had enough money to
install a shared tap for
every 2 houses. At the
village assembly the
men from the water
committee announced
that the taps would be used
to provide water for drinking and
cooking. This was good for the village,
they said, because now the women would not spend
all day carrying water from the river and boiling it to make it safe to drink.
A woman at the assembly stood up and asked, “What about washing
clothes?” One of the men from the water committee said, “You can continue
to wash clothes in the river as you always have done.” A second woman stood
up and asked, “What about bathing our children?” The man said, “You can
continue to bathe the children in the river as you always have done.” A third
woman stood up and asked, “What about our home gardens? We need water to
grow vegetables.”
The women felt their voices had not been heard. They said there was not a
single woman on the water committee and so women’s needs would not be met.
The women demanded that they be allowed to join the water committee and
help make a new plan. The rest of the assembly agreed.
The new water committee made a different plan. Rather than a tap for
every 2 houses, they would install a tap and a wash basin for every 6 houses.
Though the women would still walk to collect water, they would also be able
to wash clothes, bathe children, and clean maize right in the village. The tap
would be used for drinking water and the washbasin for everything else. This
would help make sure that the drinking water stayed clean. And they would
use the wastewater from the washbasin to water their home gardens.
The plan was popular among the men as well because it would give them a
place to wash their tools when they returned from the cornfields each day. In
this way, the villagers met many of their needs at once.
A Community Guide to Environmental Health 2012