Drinking water in Peru

From Peru, Comboni Father Alessio Geraci makes a reflection on access to safe and potable water

Yesterday, as every March 22 since 1993, World Water Day was celebrated, also to raise awareness about the 2 billion people living today without access to safely managed drinking water.

In our Peru, more than 3 million Peruvians and Peruvians (10 percent of the population) do not have potable water, and in the countryside only 3 out of 100 people receive properly chlorinated water.

In addition, most of the rivers and water sources near mining projects are useless for agriculture and human and animal consumption.

The World Water Day theme for this year is “conservation of glaciers.”

We are accompanied by the words of Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’: “Clean, potable water is an issue of first importance, because it is indispensable for human life and for sustaining terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Groundwater in many places is threatened by pollution caused by some mining, agricultural and industrial activities, especially in countries where there are insufficient regulations and controls. We are not just thinking about factory discharges.

Detergents and chemicals used by people in many parts of the world continue to spill into rivers, lakes and seas. A particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor, which causes many deaths every day. As the quality of available water steadily deteriorates, there is an advancing trend in some places to privatize this scarce resource, turned into a commodity regulated by the laws of the market. In reality, access to safe and potable water is a basic, fundamental and universal human right because it determines people’s survival and is therefore a condition for the exercise of other human rights” (LS 28-30).

What actions on a personal and community level (in your family, Christian community, neighborhood, place of study/work) will you implement to raise awareness of these issues?

Source and image

• Father Alessio Geraci