A Chinese New Year celebration held on 14 February 2009. Year of the Ox. Happy New Year
A statue of Queen Victoria looms large over proceedings.
The water vendors of Nigeria
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By Andrew Walker
BBC News, Abuja, Nigeria |
The government has failed to provide water, so the private market steps in
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Isa earns a hard living pushing a heavy water cart around the rutted streets of the suburbs of Nigeria's capital, Abuja.
He is one of tens of thousands of water vendors who deliver jerry cans full of water to houses built without any kind of sanitation.
"Kai! it is hard work, pushing my cart," the 20-year-old says.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, and according to analysts has made over $1.1 trillion in revenues from the oil industry over the last 30 years; but most Nigerians still rely on people like Isa for their water.
He and a dozen of his friends sleep in a makeshift shelter behind a small household goods shop.
They wake before dawn to queue up at a nearby borehole, where they fill 14 yellow 25-litre jerry cans on their handcarts before setting off around the streets looking for customers.
Heavy load
Fully loaded, the carts weigh at least 350kgs.
The roads they push them over are dirt tracks, rocky and pitted, with sewers running down the middle.
"In the future I want to get another job, but at least I make enough money to live doing this," Isa says.
The urban poor pay more for water than the urban rich
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Prices for water from private boreholes vary in the suburbs.
Isa pays around 10 naira ($0.07, £0.05) per jerry can at the borehole and sells for double that.
He makes around 700 naira a day ($4.70, £3.20), to cover food and living costs.
A large Nigerian family may need around 10 of these jerry-cans every day, customers say.
That adds up to about $486 (£339) every year, a massive pressure on a country where the average person lives on $2 a day.
This is a pattern repeated around the world, according to the UN Development Programme.
The urban poor in developing world cities including Abuja pay much more for their water than citizens of rich cities such as New York or Tokyo, precisely because the poor have to depend on private providers rather a piped municipal supply.
Government failure
Virtually none of the suburbs of Nigeria's capital city have what is known here as "pipe-born water" provided by the government.
Private individuals have to drill boreholes for themselves.
They are most often fitted with two sets of taps - one for the household, and another facing the street so the owners can make a bit of money on the side.
John, a 25-year-old borehole manager, says the place he looks after in Nyanya Gwandara earns his boss 7,000 naira ($47, £32) a day.
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We cannot wait for the government to do anything, we are relying on other wealthy people to dig boreholes
 Janet Daniels, Abuja resident
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"The man is from Kogi State where he lives, far away. He dug several boreholes in this area for an investment," he says.
His customers are grateful.
"We cannot wait for the government to do anything, we are relying on other wealthy people to dig boreholes," says Janet Daniels, who lives in the area.
She cannot afford to buy the water from the delivery boys, so comes every morning to the borehole to save money.
She fills two 20-litre buckets every morning and carries them on her head back to her home.
"I have to boil the water that we drink because its a very shallow borehole, and sometimes its got little particles of stuff in it."
Otherwise the quality of the water from here is ok, she says.
Husseini, another water vendor working at a borehole in Nyanya Gwandara, says people like the water from this hole, and he even charges more for it on his rounds.
Scummy rivulets
But other water vendors try and find free sources of water like streams and ponds.
These scummy rivulets are often fed by the sewer-streams that run through the middle of the streets.
Diseases like polio, cholera and other types of gastric infection disproportionately affect those in poverty, who get water from bad streams.
Abuja, like other cities in Nigeria, is rapidly growing.
The government has fallen so far behind in providing water here, it may never catch up.
Over the last year the price of a jerry-can of water has doubled.
These problems will only get more acute, and the price of water will only go up.
FROM TIME MAGAZINE by Vivienne Walt
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1876652,00.html?cnn=yes
In a dimly lit corner of a Paris bar a delighted young divorcée describes in a soft voice how she spent the day throwing snowballs for the first time in her life. That is not remarkable. This is: Nujood Ali is just 10 years old — and was, until recently, the youngest known divorced person in the world.
Slender with thick hair and a shy smile, Ali made headlines in Yemen last April when she walked out on a man more than three times her age, to whom her father had married her off. It was an act driven by terror and despair.
Nujood's ordeal began last February, when the family gathered to celebrate her wedding to a motorcycle deliveryman in his 30s. She first set eyes on the groom when she took her marriage vows. After spending her wedding night with her parents and 15 brothers and sisters, Nujood was taken by her new husband to his family village, where, she says, he beat and raped her every night. After two nightmarish months he allowed her to visit her parents, who rebuffed her pleas to end the marriage.
Nujood finally found her moment to escape one day, when her mother gave her a few pennies and sent her out to buy bread. Instead she took a bus to the center of the capital, Sanaa — a city of 3 million people — where she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the courthouse. She had never been inside a courtroom but had once seen one on television, she says, and knew it was a place where people went for help. There she sat silently on a bench, uncertain as to what to do, while crowds of people scurried past, scarcely glancing at the quiet child. It was only once the courthouse emptied during the lunch recess that the judge noticed her and asked why she was there. "I came for a divorce," she told him. Horrified, he took her to his house to play with his 8-year-old daughter, and granted the divorce two days later.
Nujood's story might have ended there, had it not caught the attention of reporters from Sanaa's newspapers, then of journalists from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Last November, New York City–based Glamour magazine gave Nujood its Woman of the Year award in a splashy Manhattan ceremony with fellow honorees that included Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Now Delphine Minoui, a French reporter for Le Figaro, has ghostwritten Nujood's autobiography.
Asked how she spent her week in Paris, Nujood's eyes widen as she says, "I saw the Eiffel Tower; I saw the Seine." Shaken by the testimony of violence during her divorce trial, Yemen's lawmakers raised the minimum age of marriage from 15 to 18. Two other girls in Sanaa — one age 9, the other 12 — have since sued for divorce, while an 8-year-old in Saudi Arabia has won a divorce suit, apparently inspired by Nujood's tale. Nujood says she hopes to ignite a far broader movement of girls to quit their child marriages, adding, "They should not be scared of their fathers or their husbands."
That might be easier said than done, especially in cultures where a girl's honor is held as supremely important. Minoui, who has spent considerable time with Nujood, says the girl still risks attacks from male relatives who believe she has sullied the family's reputation. But her fame appears to have protected her from that possibility for now.
Nujood says she thinks only about learning now — hardly the typical response from a 10-year-old child. As though she has no time to lose, she cut short her stay in Paris this week — including canceling a press conference — saying she wanted to get back to school. She says she ultimately hopes to work for women's rights in Yemen; in Paris she discussed the problem of child marriage with France's Human Rights Minister, Rama Yada, and Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara. And Nujood says she has already chosen her future career: "I want be a lawyer."
Nujood's services would be welcome. Despite Yemen's laws against child marriage, about 52% of Yemen's girls marry before the age of 18, often as the second or third wives of far older men. Worldwide, child marriage has been slow to change, according to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children" report released last month. About 49% of South Asian women in their early 20s were married before the age of 18, according to statistics gathered by UNICEF, which links early marriage to high rates of infant death and maternal mortality in very poor countries. "Often families marry off girls very young because they want to protect them, not realizing the dangers they face," says Stella Schumacher, a UNICEF child-protection specialist in New York. "It requires a change of social norms. Legislation is not enough." (Read "Selling Brides: Native Mexican Custom or Crime?")
Laws were certainly not enough to win redress for Nujood. Although her father and ex-husband were arrested for arranging an underage marriage, both were released within 10 days. Nujood's father, an out-of-work laborer, told the judge he simply wanted to shield his daughter from possible violence on Sanaa's streets. Nujood's ex-husband slipped out of sight last summer as the media attention grew. A sympathetic friend reimbursed him for the dowry of about $250 that he had paid to Nujood's father. Asked by a reporter in Paris if she hopes to meet her Prince Charming one day, Nujood sat back in her chair, crossed her arms and said bluntly, "I no longer think about marriage."
