Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

One of the rather strange things here is that you can always tell, whether in Israel  or the West Bank whether a house belongs to a Palestinian family or an Jewish family. Around 20% of the population in Israel is Palestinian so this is not a territorial thing, it is an ethnic phenomenon. Israel takes 90% of the available water in Israel and the West Bank for Jewish families. Palestinian families,wherever they live have to survive on the remaining 10%. While Israeli houses have unlimited supplies, Palestinian families have less than the WHO's minimum standard. 

Hence every Palestinian home has one or more black water tanks on the roof. In the picture above you can see the black tank on the house in the foreground. The houses in the background are Jewish. 

What makes this worse is that the Annexation wall snakes around the main aquifers in the West Bank to enable Israel to control them. Of course, this is a violation of International Law, but others countries seem not to care enough to make Israel stop stealing water.

This was brought home to me when Ayed my host told me yesterday that this house gets water one day every fortnight! Each suburb of Bethlehem gets water like people in the UK get rubbish collection. Ayed checks every day if the "mains" water is on, and when it is, he pumps the water up to 6 large tanks in the room. For the rest of the time we use the stored water. In the height of the summer, there is even less and Ayed has to buy water from a water tanker. The water is also sometimes switched off by the Israelis for security purposes. If the security issue affects a single house, a soldier may just shoot a hole in the black tank!

So just remember that when you leave the tap running to clean your teeth and turn off the tap to remember people who depend on others for their water. 

The title courtesy of the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.