At age seven, Afrah[1] was in school when Yemen’s war started in 2015. However, unlike many other Yemeni children she did not drop out due to the conflict. Instead, for the next five years her father worked hard as a motorcycle taxi driver from sunup to sundown to make sure that Afrah and her three younger sisters all went to school. When neighbors asked him why he sacrificed so much to educate his daughters, he would quote a proverb rarely repeated in the rural area where they lived, “A mother is a school and so her schooling will educate a civilized society.”
Then, as Afrah was turning 12, she noticed that her mother’s belly was starting to grow again just as it had before the birth of each of her sisters. However, this time, a shadow also started growing in the back of Afrah’s mind as her mother labored to keep up with all the housework. She noticed that her mother was making fewer and fewer trips to the well each day and sometimes they did not have enough water at home. Afrah knew that soon, with a newborn in the house, they would need even more water and she started skipping school some days to help her mother collect more each time she went to the well. By the time Afrah’s baby brother was born, she was not going to school at all.
The journey to the well took Afrah and her mother through neighboring villages and Afrah could not go alone since she might face harassment from any strangers she met along the way. That meant that Afrah and her mother had to carry her baby brother on the long trek as well as all the water their household needed each day. In the beginning, drawing water up from the well by rope over and over again made Afrah’s hands bleed and her back and arms and shoulders ached from the heavy loads she carried. She also missed her friends and her chest got tight when she passed them in their school uniforms on her way to the well. In time, however, her hands developed callouses, her arms got stronger, and she grew numb to the sight of the other girls her age who were still studying. “At least my parents are not going to force me to get married,” she sometimes thought. That had happened to some other girls her age and when she passed them on the way to the well something about their eyes made her shudder. “It’s good that my parents need me to help with the water,” she would tell herself.
At age 15, Afrah had been out of school for three years when the miracle happened—or at least that’s what she called it. She and her mother were preparing lunch the day her father burst through the door unexpectedly. With seven mouths to feed, he often skipped lunch if he had passengers and they wondered what had brought him home so early. “We’re going to get our own water tank!” he announced beaming.
“What do you mean?” Afrah’s mother asked. “That would cost a fortune and the shopkeeper is already after you for what we owe him for this month’s groceries.”
“A non-profit with a rainwater harvesting program has selected us as beneficiaries,” he said. “The tank won’t cost us anything.”
Afrah’s mother buried her face in her hands and said, “I don’t believe it. I’ve wished for a water tank by my house ever since the first time I went to the well when I was just a girl. I can’t remember a day since then that I didn’t go to the well for water—and I never wanted my daughters to spend their lives collecting water as I have. This is a dream. It’s too good to be true.”
Despite her mother’s disbelief, Afrah watched a few weeks later as a bright white tank was installed by her house along with a piping system that would fill it from the rainwater that fell on their roof. Her mother cried so many tears of joy that her father told her to go cry on the roof so her tears would fill the tank. Best of all, after the very next rain, Afrah went back to school.
Afrah and her family live in a rural district of Yemen’s Taiz province. They are among the more than 70 percent of Yemenis that have never been reached by Yemen’s piped water network and often rely on unsafe wells. Meanwhile, the piped water networks that do exist in urban areas like the provincial capital of Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city, have rarely functioned during the last eight years of war.[2] The director of Taiz’s water authority, Samir Abdulwahid says the availability of water in Taiz city is around 0.7 liters per person per day[3]—leaving residents to rely on expensive private companies who deliver water to those who can afford to pay.[4] Meanwhile, nationwide, about 14.5 million people—nearly half the population—do not have access to safe drinking water according to the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
In this context, improving access to clean water is both a lifesaver and a life-changer for Yemeni women and girls in rural areas like Afrah and her mother—as well as for those in urban areas like Taiz City.[5] However, the impact of girls like Afrah returning to school cannot be fully measured for years to come. This means Yemen’s future prosperity depends on the foresight of partners willing to pour into these initiatives now. As Yemeni women and girls spend less time traveling to and from wells of water for survival, they will spend more time drinking from the wells of knowledge that will prepare them to contribute to bringing lasting change to their families and communities.
[1] Names changed to protect Yemeni families living through conflict.
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/video/20230619-school-or-water-yemen-s-children-pay-price-for-conflict-and-climate-change
[3] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230617-children-in-war-scarred-yemen-line-up-for-water-not-school
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb8ALPXzu08&t=1s
[5] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/05/10/yemen-women-at-the-center-of-water-agriculture-and-family-income
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