In the remote village of Shibar as elsewhere in Afghanistan, the daily tasks that require water are often devoted to women, who have become the first to undergo the increased drought that strikes the country.
“Cooking, dishes, getting water, laundry, taking care of children and washing them: water is above all a matter of women,” explains Choukria Attaye, teacher in this locality perched at the top of a mountain in the central province of Bamiyan.
Before the village was provided with toilets and a clear water source thanks to the French Solidarity NGO (SI), children often fell ill because of the water contaminated by human and animal excrement.
Girls and women also had to make kilometers to draw water from streams and wells.
AFP
“Transporting liters and liters caused them back pain to them,” said Ms. Attaye.
Access to water is a recurring problem in the country, one of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and where the 48 million inhabitants are already stuck in poverty and malnutrition.
UNICEF estimated in May that 31% of Afghans did not have access to drinking water and 42% to basic hygiene products, “an even heavier burden for women and girls”.
The Taliban authorities claim that rural areas actually have more clean water thanks to AFP Motiullah Abid, spokesperson for the Ministry of Water, its own projects to access drinking water and hygiene.
One bath per week
Before Ziziza Shouja, an international solidarity speaker, organizes awareness-raising sessions with women, “many of them did not know what a good hygiene was,” she said to AFP.
These meetings in his native province of Bamiyan have lowered the number of patients, but the problem “cannot be resolved in five or six months, this requires continuous effort,” she said.
AFP
It notes many cases of diarrhea and severe skin problems. Water unfit for consumption can also cause nausea and respiratory diseases and cause typhoid fever and malnutrition, notes Ms. Shouja.
Below of Shibar, the village of Qavriyak is also faced with a water shortage.
“There is not enough to wash or take a shower every day and you have no clean toilets,” says Massouma Darweshi, 26, to AFP.
Children take a bath once a week and water is lacking to wash the diapers, but also the cotton towels used for menstruation.
The hygienic towels available at the village supermarket are a luxury out of reach, known as Massouma Darweshi.
In the village, women often fall ill. To get to the nearest clinic, you have to take a junk road, motorcycle or donkey back.
Women also use donkeys to get water through almost dry gorges.
Inaccessible wells
In the central province of Maidan Wardak, all the wells of the village of Chinzai, where Gol Babo lives, were blocked by the sudden floods of June, which rather than bringing the water that lacked, devastated the houses and carried away the cattle.
AFP
From now on, women must share the toilets with the men of the village. A source of gene for the inhabitants, who bathe in a very conservative culture reinforced by the “gender apartheid” imposed by the Taliban since their return to power in 2021, according to the UN.
Another consequence of the lack of water, Gul Babo and her daughter must improvise towels by cutting dirty clothes when they have their period.
Everything remains in Gul Babo is posed near the tent where his family now lives, without mattresses or carpets to protect them from insects.
“The water we were just enough to drink, so we don’t have one to wash our things,” she says. “Everything is outside, dirty”.
