Markets * Yemen - Water crisis builds

The resource's scarcity in rural areas sends migrants to swell the capital, which may run out by 2025


Sana,Yemen -The Los Angeles Times (USA), by Haley Sweetland Edwards & Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo,Egypt -October 11, 2009: -- Aisha Sufi, a woman with tired eyes and nine children, waits for a water truck in a nation of drought... She is one of an estimated 150,000 Yemenis who have left their villages this year bound for Sana, Yemen's capital, in search of basic needs. Water and jobs, for example, are increasingly scarce in rural regions where many populations have quadrupled since the 1980s... Sufi used to send her daughters to a nearby well to collect water in plastic buckets, but that well has been contaminated with sewage. She waits for the next tanker truck to rumble up the unpaved street outside her house, her youngest children and grandchildren gathered around her, ranging in age from 4 to 20... "It's terrible to wonder how your children will survive. But I ask myself, what else can I do? In the village, is there a future? No. But here, is there a future?" Sufi sighs deeply and rubs the backs of her ashen and wrinkled hands... "I don't know. It's in God's hands"... (Yahya Arhab / European Pressphoto Agency / September 25, 2009 - Two women at a camp for the internally displaced in northwestern Yemen wait for a water tank to be filled so they can fill jerrycans)