Not a drop to drink

Not a drop to drink is the blog accompanying my television documentary of the same name, addressing issues of access to clean water in Kenya.

Water has long been an issue that intrigues me. I spent five months living in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2007, the scene of a water revolt in 2000 that shut the city down and eventually forced an American multinational to withdraw from the country. Naomi Klein, eat your heart out. See the Democracy Center’s reports for more details.

While I was in Bolivia, I suffered from ‘traveller’s tummy’ again and again, mostly because I insisted on brushing my teeth with water from the tap. In the poorest country in mainland South America, very few people dare to drink water from the tap – it simply is not safe. Yet Bolivia’s summer is a rainy season, with pure wet stuff pouring out of the sky every day. And during El Niño years, the floods that hit Bolivia cause widespread contamination of water sources.

During my undergraduate degree, I learned a great deal about resource conflicts (thank you, Dr Rosaleen Duffy) and learned specifically that it is often an abundance of a resource that causes the most conflict. Think about the blood diamonds of Sierra Leone. I’m not sure if water counts as a scarce or abundant resource, but we certainly get enough of it in this country.

And let’s face it, pics of water generally look great on TV. We all loved David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet.

So, water. And Kenya. Kenya is in the grip of a food shortage affecting most of east Africa. But we don’t think of Kenya when we think of famine and drought – we think of Somalia and Ethiopia. It’s one of those places that we jet off to on honeymoons or safari holidays without thinking of the plight of the people who live there. We check in to plush hotels with an embarrassment of luxuries without thinking of how different this experience is to that of the locals. Plus my cousin Sarah de Mowbray lives near Mombasa and is a water engineer. Perfect!