While travel in the developing world often gives you a glimpse of the past – what the world was like before tractors and machinery, running water or electricity – I find, more and more, it is offering glimpses of the future, and it is not a happy one. If you count yourself among the world’s shrinking number of skeptics about the impact of global warming, you need to come to southern Tanzania – or to Kenya, or to Zambia, or to Zimbabwe, or to just about anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – and I’m certain your illusions will fade fast.
As I write this from a plastic table at a small motel in the town of Same (sa-may), a few tiny raindrops are splattering my computer screen. And though the rainy seasons is just beginning here, that is all this region is likely to see for awhile, according to the locals – villagers and water and sanitation engineers alike – that I spent the last two days with. Like many parts of East Africa, Tanzania is subject to increasingly frequent and increasingly severe droughts. For us in the West, that means no watering the lawn. For those here in rural Tanzania it means upheaval, displacement, and possible catastrophe. For the women I met today at a water point not too far out of town, it means a 14 kilometer walk, each day, to gather a single five gallon bucket of water from a distant water point when theirs isn’t turned on – which it isn’t, 6 of every 7 days due to water restrictions. From that five gallon bucket, one woman I met must wash all of her family’s clothes, cook their meals, and have enough left over for drinking water and, occasionally, bathing. There are six in her family. Ask yourself if you could use less than one gallon of water day. Ask yourself again, especially if you are a woman, if you could spend 8 to 10 hours, 6 days a week, on a quest for water, because that’s how long it takes to walk 7 kilometers, wait for dozens of other women to fill their buckets from a single tap, and walk 7 kilometers home.
And while drought is not unusual in Africa, what has me feeling a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge on this trip, visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, is that the water shortages here now are not just related to the drought. In 1997, the village of Masandare, where I spent the day, was placed on a three day a week water ration by the newly formed water authority, which recognized that there simply was not enough water for the district’s burgeoning population. For locals that meant you had access to water from your local borehole for three days of every week. The other days you walked to distant sites to fetch it.
That was 12 years ago, and water was already scarce, In 2002, that ration amount was dropped to twice each week – same water, more people. Today, it is once a week, and the water is still disappearing. The consequences of so little water form a chain reaction. Men take the cattle further in further in search of water, and desperate animals graze on any green they can find, bringing herders and pastoralists into conflict. Vegetation, once killed by overgrazing, gives up its hold on the soil, and erosion kicks in, which in turn kills other vegetation, and blows away the precious topsoil, which then yields fewer and fewer crops until, eventually planting is impossible. Poverty increases, and poor people are poor managers of their environment. In Zimbabwe, where I was earlier on this trip, the animals in the wild areas I visited are being slaughtered by poachers on a scale you cannot imagine – simple victims of hunger. This poaching has already wiped out the wild game populations of much of Zimbabwe’s rural areas – so much so that I seriously doubt they will come back in my lifetime. More rural poor are flocking to the overcrowded cities in search of work – cities built in the 1950’s and 60’s to hold a quarter of the population they now hold. In Nairobi on my way here, it was completely normal to spend an hour traveling 2 or 3 kilometers within the city, the narrow roads completely choked with traffic, a dramatic difference from just four years ago when I lived there. In Haiti, where I was earlier this year, an hour for a 4 kilometer ride would be quick. And it is only getting worse.
If you think all of this sounds too pessimistic, too gloomy to be true, you must live in America, or Western Europe. Because the rest of the world doesn’t need Al Gore to tell them the planet is sick, and we are the virus that is killing it. Do yourself a favor. The next time you brush your teeth, turn the tap water off. The next time you want to wash your car, don’t. And just because you buy energy efficient light bulbs, you are not a conservationist. We need, all of us, to think drastically differently about how we are using our resources, because every time I take a trip now I see, more and more, what the future will look like if we don’t do something immediate and drastic. Because I have seen what is coming, and it genuinely scares me. 
August 28th, 2009 | by David in Travel
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
