Argentina’s schoolbooks may continue presenting our country as a green blanket, an infinite and fertile pampa but its real geography and inhabitants say something else.
They tell us that there is scant rainfall in much of our territory and that the destruction of forestry linked to crop monoculture has complicated things yet further and that water is definitely not as abundant as we are accustomed to believe and nor is it as pure and crystalline as we have supposed. In fact, it is usually contaminated – with biological material, agrochemicals, arsenic – containing in any event short-term and long-range risks to health. At the same time, as highlighted in Valorando el Agua (“Valuing Water”), a 2021 World Bank report regarding the situation in Argentina, “water is an important factor perpetuating conditions of vulnerability and poverty for the 17 percent of the population lacking access to it, in many cases having to pay up to 460 percent more for bottled water.”
Over seven million people in Argentina lack access to drinking water with a huge percentage of them the children of the most vulnerable sectors. This situation not only implies a breach of fundamental rights (to health, education and leisure) but it also compromises their future. Without regular access to safe water, the children are more exposed to illnesses, thus also risking having less days of class, jeopardising their education.
“Sometimes we are unaware of how important and scarce water is, we take it for granted as something which is always going to be there when in reality water is a daily challenge for thousands of people in our country,” says Joaquin Altgelt, the director of Fundación Aguas – an NGO which has been working since 2016 on the right of the most vulnerable communities. “From people who have to walk a distance to reach a tap to people who depend on rainfall or a well, there are also kinds of situations, some of them profoundly unjust. For example, there are kids in provinces like Santiago del Estero, Chaco or Salta who to extract water from a cistern have to lift huge buckets weighing up to 12 kilos. It seems incredible but that is the reality in many regions of Argentina,” he reveals.
According to environmental engineer Yenith Bonilla, who has a masters degree in water management, Argentina’s problems are multiple and complex because it’s not just about scarcity but also contamination. The specialist heads a project called El Mapa Del Agua (“The Water Map”), which seeks to survey the quality of water in our country. The preliminary results are worrying, to say the least. The study, jointly driven by ITBA (Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires) and Fundación Aguas, illuminates an often invisible problem: that many people (especially in rural areas) are consuming water that is not of the best quality.
“Since 2016 to date, we have collected around 614 samples of water with the aim of getting to know the quality of water consumed by the communities and families, mainly in the rural zones of Chaco, Santiago del Estero, Salta, Jujuy and Buenos Aires Provinces, among others. With ITBA we total 755 results from samples to complete a total of 1,369 results regarding the quality of water. We see that the water can be contaminated by pathogenic microorganisms arising out of faecal matter like Escherichia coli, heavy metals, arsenic and chemical compounds like nitrates, fluorine and pesticides,” details the expert.
The result? Fully 31 percent of the samples analysed present bacteriological contamination with Escherichia Coli, 23 percent top the arsenic limits established by the Código Alimentario Argentino (Argentine Food Code, CAA) and the presence of pesticides was detected in every sample, exceeding the limits established by the norms in 23 percent of the cases while also detecting nitrites in the samples analysed – 44 percent of them gave positive for this contaminating substance, which, as explained by the engineer “prolonged exposure to high levels of nitrites can be associated with health problems in adults such as cardiovascular disorders although this depends on the dosage and duration of the exposure.”
Evidently the issue is not only whether or not to have access to water but also to the right water, free from contaminating material. Since this is not possible, the challenge becomes to obtain water which complies with quality standards. This in some cases requires changing the source of water (for example, using rainfall instead of underground water) and in other cases, treatment with filters or chlorine, among other alternatives.
Common problem, shared solutions
Even when the situation can become acute in northern provinces, the challenge of water is felt nationwide with particular features in each place. People and communities are organising themselves everywhere to confront those realities.
In this veritable “water epic,” schools and educational communities are playing a key role with the problems being raised in school where the solutions start to be outlined. Secondary school teacher Mariela Yáñez, who heads the Science Club at Escuela 63 in Pampa del Infierno, Chaco, is the protagonist of a great experience together with her pupils. That place honours its name by being as hot as hell in summer with a blowtorch sun burning everything and evaporating each drop of water.
“Last March we had to suspend some classes due to the heat because in Pampa there is no ventilation, far less air conditioning. I’m from Sáenz Peña, 95 kilometres distant from Pampa del Infierno and was overwhelmed by many things at first because in my home I open the tap and out comes running water but not here – we depend on the municipal cistern. But if precautions are not taken, the water becomes contaminated and useless,” explains the teacher.
That was precisely where the community grouped around its school to start changing its history. There was a science workshop in 2019, followed by one by Fundación Aguas to train the teachers in the care of water and washing their hands. Finally in 2022 they managed to construct a system for capturing rainfall (Sistema de Captación de Agua de Lluvias, or SCALL in its Spanish acronym) – concretely, a gigantic cistern with the capacity to store 52,000 litres of water. It has a cover which prevents the liquid from being contaminated by leaves or insects and the water passes through a filter to purify it.
Something worth noting – it was the families of the community (fathers, mothers and even grandmothers) who, following training, mixed the cement to construct this gigantic storage space which today supplies water not only to the school but also the families of the zone.
“The thing about it was that apart from everything we did, it had a multiplier effect because the kids from my school are “ambassadors of water” in Chaco, constantly divulging the importance of washing their hands without wasting liquid and looking after the water at every moment.
Nowadays and for some time back we are working so that a small school (No. 703) which also lacks access to safe water can have its SCALL,” says Yáñez smiling.
Down to work
Apart from resolving such essential questions as the supply of water, work is often needed on its care and manual hygiene, taking into account that the latter is the first line of defence against illnesses and the most effective way to prevent over 200 of them. It is no coincidence that the NGO works side-by-side with the vulnerable schools of this country in workshops dictating how to wash hands and take care of the water.
“It sometimes seems incredible to the kids and their teachers that in less than a minute and with less than half a litre of water, somebody can wash their hands. Without mentioning their surprise when they find out that grey water can be used to cleanse or irrigate,” says Víctor Jordán, the Project Manager of Fundación Aguas.
To date the organisation has run 290 educational programmes on this subject and installed 80 ELM hand-washing stations as an emergency solution. One of these kits was donated by the pupils of Colegio Lomas High School, after a chat in which the kids got to know that in some places in our country, something as basic as drinking water or washing your hands is not guaranteed or demands such an enormous effort as hauling a bucket of 12 litres from the bottom of the cistern.
But to tackle the question of water in truly integral fashion, apart from the infrastructure (constructing and improving the wells, cisterns, pipelines, etc.) and training, the requirements also include a prior diagnosis of the quality of the water in order to be able to choose how to resolve each problem. Specific filters are used for each problem (bacteriological contamination, arsenic, pesticides) eventually changing the source of water whenever possible. For example, in zones where the underground water is contaminated with arsenic, they switch to rainwater or directly to bottled water.
Against what one might believe, the problems with water imply rather more than infrastructure. In reality there are several dimensions to the care of water with the human not the least of them. Logically enough, as a basic human right, no cause is more urgent but at the same time many people tend to look to officialdom to resolve it. In this case, it is the communities themselves, organised and committed, which established and set in motion the tools best adapted to resolve the problem.
Cleanliness, the access, for example, to a decent, hygienic bathroom with discharge of water is another aspect linked to the lack of water with an impact far beyond the evident. In the north of our country, for example, the girls of places with less access tend to skip class during their period or, if they go, are withdrawn in class, “far more quiet and nervous. They are afraid of leaving a stain or being mocked because the used towels are burnt in the patio so that everybody finds out that some girl is menstruating,” explains a teacher from the zone.
The water issue extends to dimensions which are perhaps not so evident with the creature comforts of the big city but are crucial in those territories. And there also it is civil society which traces the paths leading from absence to hope.
* Journalist, UBA literature graduate, scholar of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) and doing a masters degree at FLASCO.