At just 10 years old, Omar[1] carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. It is a weight that he measures in the plastic jerry cans—six small ones, four medium ones, and one large one—that he loads onto his donkey twice a day to collect water for his household. If Omar fails in this task, his mother and four brothers and sisters, two of whom are under five years old, will have no water at all. This means that water is the first thing on Omar’s mind when he wakes up in the morning and finds a place outside their rural village home to relieve himself. They have no bathroom in the small dwelling of stone and concrete blocks where they live, and when he finishes, Omar tells himself he will wait until he gets to the well to wash his hands. They have no soap at home anyway, and this will spare any of the precious water still remaining from his last trip to the well for his family members. Still, Omar knows that hand washing is important, and he worries about getting sick—who would collect water for the others if something happened to him?
For the last three years, ever since Omar’s father died, he has been making the trek to the well with his donkey using a rough, highland path that rises and falls with the contours of the steep ravines that etch the slopes of the mountain where they live. For most of that time, when he arrived at the well, it was already crowded, and he had to wait his turn to fill his containers by drawing water up from the well manually. Once he finally lowered his own rope and began raising buckets of water hand over hand from the depths below, he would remind himself not to rush. The burden of responsibility that came with his task balanced his small frame against the load of each heavy bucket he drew up. He never finished this task without thinking of the boy two years older than him who’d lost his footing and fallen into the well while drawing water, drowning before he could be rescued.
The trek to the well, waiting for his turn, filling his 11 containers, and the trek back home used to take Omar from an hour to an hour and a half. He would get up early to complete his morning chore in time to get to school, where he had reached the fourth grade, rushing home after school each day to make another trip to the well in the afternoon. Omar counted himself fortunate, even then, knowing other children in his village had dropped out of school because of the time they spent collecting water—especially the girls, or boys who did not have a donkey to help them transport their jerry cans. Some of them lived closer to the well than Omar, but he did not envy the women and young girls he saw carrying heavy containers of water back home on their heads, or the boys who hoisted them onto their shoulders or simply lugged them along in their hands.
Since last year, however, Omar and all the other children responsible for collecting water in his village have been counting themselves fortunate. That’s because a local non-profit worked to rehabilitate and improve the well that most of them visit twice a day. Instead of drawing water using a rope and bucket, they now fill their water containers from spigots connected to a large concrete reservoir that the non-profit constructed. A solar-powered pump fills the reservoir with water from the well, allowing all the villagers to collect water more safely and more quickly. The task that used to take children like Omar up to an hour and a half each morning and each afternoon, now takes just 30 minutes, and students who had dropped out of school have enrolled again. Moreover, the non-profit also distributed water filters to all the families in the village, so boys like Omar, who bear burdens beyond their years, don’t worry as much about getting sick.
While the situation in Omar’s village has improved since the non-profit’s intervention last year, many other Yemenis have been getting sicker in 2025. Yemen continues to grapple with one of the world’s worst cholera epidemics,[2] while cases of dengue fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases are on the rise in coastal cities like Aden. In Aden, ongoing power outages mean that sewage pumps have ceased functioning, causing sewage overflows in several neighborhoods and creating fetid breeding pools for mosquitoes that spread many illnesses. Residents in some parts of Aden also report that the piped water from the city that filled their household water tanks in June was mixed with sewage. This contaminated water was emptied from the tanks, to the dismay of households who wondered when the city’s water supply would fill them again. In the meantime, neither the tanks themselves nor the pipes connected to them are being sanitized.[3]
In these circumstances, getting sick anywhere in Yemen can be devastating. Most families living in rural areas of Yemen, like Omar’s village, cannot afford the cost of transportation to reach the nearest health clinic, much less the cost of any treatment they might need. Meanwhile, shortages of staff and medical supplies due to the withdrawal of support from international organizations mean that hospitals in cities like Aden are being overwhelmed. Furthermore, widespread economic hardship is fueling a demand for cheaper, counterfeit medications that are being smuggled into the country, where the money spent on them only adds to the health risks faced by the Yemenis who use them. Reports indicate that approximately 60 percent of all drugs in the Yemeni market are either of poor quality or illegally imported, including drugs with falsified expiration dates as well as counterfeit pharmaceutical products.[4]
Fortunately, 60 health care facilities in Yemen that had been turning away patients due to a lack of water are now receiving support from the World Health Organization (WHO) that is allowing them to uphold basic sanitation and infection prevention protocols once again. A nurse at one hospital explained that before the WHO’s intervention, the staff would check the water tanks when they arrived for duty, before they checked on patients. “If there was no water, we had to rethink everything—sterilization, wound care, even washing hands.”[5]
Thus, today in Yemen’s ocean of water poverty and disease, the interventions of both local and international organizations remain critical to saving lives and raising spirits. Their work represents oases of relief that are restoring dignity and hope in villages and hospitals where it has all but evaporated. In the coming months, those oases will either expand or shrink depending on whether the world’s water wealthy act to ensure that everyone has access to this essential resource.
[1] Name changed to safeguard a vulnerable Yemeni family.
[2] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-yemen-france-reveals-highly-drug.html#google_vignette, Anadolu Ajansi
[3] https://south24.net/news/news.php?nid=4675, https://www.yemenonline.info/special-reports/9501
[4] https://dawnmena.org/the-human-cost-of-yemens-health-care-collapse/, https://www.mdpi.com/2813-4524/2/2/11
[5] https://www.emro.who.int/yemen/news/every-drop-counts-how-clean-water-is-restoring-hope-to-yemens-hospitals.html
Comments +