Untold Stories

People Around the World Share Their Water Stories

Chris Riha, Pulitzer Center

Nine-year-old Ely Kleinsmith knows that water and sanitation are issues that affect us all -- and that it's up to each of us to insure that everyone in the world has access to these resources that too many of us take for granted. What Ely has done, in his hometown of Solon, Iowa, is to found a Water Club aimed at raising awareness, and attract funding, for water-related programs in Haiti. He tells the story here.

When it comes to global challenges that touch every human, there's nothing like water and sanitation. This is an issue that engages everyone of us, like no other, and everyone has a distinctive story to tell. As a part of the Pulitzer Center’s ongoing water reporting we've been encouraging people to share their stories. More than a dozen have done so this week, joining the global conversation at our Water Wars interactive portal.

It's a great opportunity to expose people around the world to water-related problems in your area and to learn how this precious resource is treated across the globe -- especially now, with Congress debating the Paul Simon Water for the World Act that would greatly expand the dollars available to assure access to clean water and sanitation.

The Nepali Rain God

In the last parched weeks of the dry season before the monsoon arrives-- an eight month drought that has starved the fields, wells, and power generators on which Nepal depends-- the villagers of Pattan take the hulking figure of a rain god from his temple home and parade it through the streets in a plea for better hydrological fortunes. 

Learn more about this project at South Asia's Troubled Waters

And join the conversation by sharing your story about water here.

Water for the World: Senate hurdles, global challenge

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center

A shortage of co-sponsors, and political will, is blocking Senate action on the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, a bill named for the late Illinois senator that sets a goal, with funding, of providing an additional 100 million people with access to clean water and sanitation. It's a classic Washington impasse, politicians jostling over competing priorities and limited resources. But there's a human face to this issue too, one that's abundantly clear in recent Pulitzer Center reports from around the world.

A wrenching video by Anna-Katarina Gravgaard captures the daily struggle of slum dwellers in South Delhi, scrambling to siphon a bit of water from the tanker truck that passes through the neighborhood once a day -- while across the street, in a high-income compound, residents have built cisterns holding hundreds of gallons to assure that their own taps never run dry.

Ernest Waititu, reporting from the Kakuma refugee camp in the arid Turkana region of northwestern Kenya, join women and girls as they dig down to pockets of water, much of it impure, in the dried up bed of the Tarach River.

Sean Gallagher travels by rail and truck across north central China, documenting in photography and print what scientists consider the most rapid instance of desertification in the entire world.

From the Himalayan Hot Zone

Anna-Katerina Gravgaard, for the Pulitzer Center

Imagine a collaboration between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal and Afghanistan. It sounds nearly impossible, but they all seek help to solve a common problem: The Himalayas are changing and everyone fears the consequences.

The Himalayas, which are often called "The Roof of the World", contain some of the most extensive and rough high altitude areas on Earth as well as the greatest area of glaciers and permafrost outside of the poles. Ten of Asia’s largest rivers flow from here, and more than a billion people’s livelihoods depend on them. To complicate matters further, temperatures are rising more rapidly here than the global average. In Nepal the temperature has risen with 0.6 degree over the last decade, whereas the global warming has been around 0.7 over the last hundred years.

Drastic Moves Against Urbanization

Anna-Katerina Gravgaard, for the Pulitzer Center

The streets of Kathmandu yesterday looked like a set of a western movie just before the high noon showdown — shuttered and quiet at midday in the June heat. The reason: Nepal’s dominant ethnic group had called for a general strike to press for their demand to declare Kathmandu an autonomous region.

While the Tap is On (Video from Delhi)

Anna-Katarina Gravgaar, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

A couple of days ago we got a powerful glimpse of the psychology of water. Jyoti Sharma, President of the water related ngo FORCE invited me to witness the situation in and around the C sector in Vasant Kunj, South Delhi. Here, everyone stocks up on water. But whereas the slum dwellers only manage to fill their buckets and small containers from a public water tanker with little more than the 20 liters a human needs per day, the rich acquire thousands of liters during the one hour of running water the Government provides for them -just in case there will be no water tomorrow.

Download While the Tap is On

Learn more about this project at South Asia's Troubled Waters

And join the conversation by sharing your story about water here.

In Nepal, Environment is Hostage to Political Crisis

W.G. Wheeler, for the Pulitzer Center

A few days after my colleague and I arrived in Nepal, the Prime Minister resigned. Since his departure, street protests have brought the potential for violent clashes and the derailment of a nascent peace process that ended a 10-year Maoist insurgency in 2006. When I showed up at the World Bank office in Kathmandu last week asking about climate change, my interview subject seemed pleasantly surprised.

“Wow,” said Claudia Sadoff,” it’s nice to see people are still interested in the environment.”

Sadoff, who is the Bank’s lead economist on climate change in South Asia, explained that the day-to-day volatility is something of an existential rub for long-term investment organizations working in the developing world. But even in more developed nations, she said, short-term political calculus is at odds with the long-range planning preparation for climate change will require.

South Asia's Troubled Waters

Pulitzer Center reporter Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, introduces our latest water project, direct from the field in Nepal.



Learn more about this project and join the conversation here.

Delhi’s Dark Waters

Text and video by Alex Stonehill with reporting by Ernest Waititu, for the Pulitzer Center

Like many world cities, Delhi was born on the banks of a river.  The Yamuna, a tributary of the Ganges, originates in the pristine foothills of the Himalayas, and flows south through farmlands until it feeds into the Indian capitol city. 

But as Delhi’s population has exploded – increasing sevenfold in the last 50 years, the river has become little more than a massive sewer, sucked dry of its clean water just as it enters the city, and filled back up with mostly untreated waste water just a few hundred meters later.

The scene on the banks of the Yamuna, near the Waziribad Bridge, is one of tragic irony.  Hindu worshipers, who believe it is holy, “wash” themselves in water that has officially been declared unfit for human or animal contact, while destitute migrants sift through garbage and religious offerings that have been dumped into the river, in search of anything of value that they can resell.

Finding your way to the river isn’t hard: you catch a sulfurous scent in the air, and follow one of hundreds of open drains – slow moving streams of dark gray water flanked by mountains of garbage – which join together like capillaries, building size and speed until they finally pour into the river itself.
But finding a place to cast blame for Yamuna’s dismal state isn’t so easy. 

Ethiopia: Water wars, or peace?

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center
 

ADDIS ABABA _ The premise of the Pulitzer Center's reporting project on East Africa water issues is explicit in the title itself -- WaterWars, the notion that increasing population and unequal access is a near-certain recipe for conflict in the decades ahead.

But what if the challenges of competition over water led to cooperation instead? What if the very essentialness of water to life means that otherwise opposed individuals, groups and nations may in fact be more likely to set aside narrow self-interest to pursue sustainable solutions for all?

A recent reporting trip to Ethiopia, under the auspices of the Geneva journalism organization Media21, offered intriguing evidence for this counter-intuitive view, from small-scale regional studies to issues as big as the Nile River basin.