In this small mountain village located in the inaccessible mountain, we met a lot of children, they can carry a 30-jin kettle to walk dozens of miles of mountain roads, with small young shoulders, carrying the family's drinking water.

The terrain of The Nongli Village is complex, and villagers cannot dig wells to use groundwater or lay natural water pipes. The daily water consumption of the villagers is a big problem. Now people can only rely on the method of pulling shoulders, staggering for hours or even dozens of hours, along the rugged mountain roads, to find the water in the depths of the mountains. Sometimes, villagers can only find a small amount of water. As for whether the water quality is clean, villagers already feel that it does not matter. "There is water" is their only requirement.

Difficult to use water

The Nongli Village has 25 households with a total of 110 people. The young and middle-aged people, the main labor force, have gone out to work to support their families, leaving only the elderly and children in the village. Their water problem has become a survival issue.

Here, the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) Water Safety Fund met a family. The family had only 5 children and an elderly grandmother. The oldest child was only 12 years old and the youngest was only 6 and a half years old. The mother of these five children left the house when the youngest child was 8 months old, and since then there has been no news. In order to maintain his livelihood, his father had to go out of the mountains and go to the city to work hard to support his family.

When children of the same age reach for their hands, open their mouths with meals, and enjoy the care of their families, these children have long become the backbone of the family, taking care of the elderly grandmother, cutting grass, picking up feces, raising chickens, feeding pigs, and going further to look for water deep in the mountain, and then go back home for grandma and themselves. They took the responsibility of the family with their tender shoulders.

Five children less than 1.2 meters tall are stronger than their peers. In order to have water to drink and use, they each carried a 30-jin water bottle. Like the villagers, they trudged in the mountains for a few hours. The mountain road is very difficult to walk, and the safety of children is difficult to guarantee.

What we can do

Through the investigation of the local natural environment and water use problems, the CBCGDF Water Safety Fund will build a 50-square-meter water cellar there to solve the problems of children's water difficulty and expensive water use, and solve the children's process of finding water at the same time, we will also equip them with water purifiers to completely solve the safety problems of children's drinking water.

About China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) Water Safety Fund:

http://www.cbcgdf.org/English/NewsShow/4995/7697.html

Nongli Village, Bansheng Township, Dahua Yao Autonomous County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

(Photo credit: CBCGDF)

Original Chinese article:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FYcbLfm1Ty4fllQEaUu4fA

By / Maggie