Helping Our Water-Stressed World

The picture on this issue’s cover haunts me. The girl’s name is Aminata Dicko, according to WaterAid, the nonprofit group that supplied the photo, and she’s collecting water from a pond near the Mali village of Ourare Alaye Tem, which is close to the border with Burkina Faso. Ponds and deep wells that fill during the rainy season are the village’s only source of water, according to a WaterAid slideshow. The water Dicko is collecting is unclean. The pond is polluted with animal excreta and all kinds of dirt that blow into it, but it’s all the village has. In the dry season, villagers travel for days seeking water, sometimes into Burkina Faso. I cannot bear to think that this beautiful girl, who must be in her early teens, may never know much beyond the backbreaking life in her tiny arid village. Elsewhere on the Internet are pictures showing the ...