In focus
 By Ramadhani Kupaza
Behaviour in the wake of water shortages
Housemaids and other women dressed up in colourful cloths called kanga or vitenge in Swahili are seen walking in pairs frequently along the streets in the peri-urban areas of Arusha City. The maids and women carry equally colourful twenty litre plastic buckets on their heads. The buckets contain water to drink in the wake of acute water shortages in the City.
Housemaids in Arusha are girls. Therefore, the word housemaid is synonymous with the term house girls in Arusha. The girls walk in pairs comprising buddies from neighbourhoods when they search for water. The girls use the occasion to socialize while they walk around in search of stand pipes that produce water or when they stand in long queues to fetch water at the stand pipes.
But there used to be houseboys in Arusha in the past as well. House boys did everything that house girls do except that the boys used their hands rather than heads to carry buckets of water. Currently, boys prefer to idle or engage in unproductive activities daily rather than fetch water to drink at home. It does not matter for the boys if their households experience acute shortages of water.
It means that water quantity for bathing is more limited since it is of less importance compared to drinking and cooking. As a result, people have to find alternative to bathing in order to ensure that they do not produce foul smell especially where the means of transport is the City buses in which passengers are crowded. Bus conductors instruct students to sit on each others’ laps in order to fill up every inch of the space in the buses.
People use perfumes as an option to bathing. They blow all kinds of perfumes on their bodies to prevent emission of foul body orders. It probably serves the purpose somewhat on a cool day and for white collar employees who sit in offices. Use of perfumes for that purpose is an alternative used by those who cannot find water for both drinking and bathing.
The people who can find water to clean their bodies prefer to use showers rather than bath tabs because they use less water when using showers for the purpose.
Some people use a body-wiping technique when they are able to access only several litres of water for cleaning their bodies. They soak small hand towels called face cloths in water and use the cloth to wipe particularly parts of the body which emit foul smell. Some parts of the body that emit foul smell are common for many but others are specific to individuals. Individuals or their close partners are aware of this.
The middle class in Arusha City install water tanks to store water from taps when it is available. But soon this category of people will remain with empty tanks when most people have installed such tanks at their premises. The reason is that the amount of water which is available for residents of the City is simply not enough. It reminds of the problem of sharing a resource which is inaccessible or its quantities are inadequate.
Other residents of Arusha dig wells to supplement quantities of water supplied by the Water and City Authorities. Such people are forced to meet neighbours who visit to queue for water at the wells. The owners may view the neighbours as intruders. They would feel insecure and nervous.
Elsewhere in Southern Africa there are stories that people who live in the deserts use monkeys to locate sources of water. They trap the monkeys, lure the animals to lick salt in order to make them feel thirsty. The people would release the monkeys after a while. The thirsty people would run after the thirsty monkeys which would apparently run towards the direction of sources of water to drink. Monkeys are water loving animals. Therefore, they live in areas where they can find water with ease.
At the community level, people fight to access water to drink and to irrigate their crops. Animosity among different communities in Arusha is increasing in the wake of scarcity of water. Animosity will become worse in the future since quantities of water are finite while human populations are increasing. Climate change will complicate the situation. further.
|
