Mother tells of water woes

By Ilia L Likou 02 January 2018, 12:00AM

Water is life and clean water means good health for your family.

That’s the opinion of Tafiau Sio, 41, from the village of Letogo.

Tafiau and her family have been struggling without a clean supply of water for a long time.

Her husband works at one of the companies in town and earns $120 per week to support their nine children.

All of their children attend school except for their youngest child.

Tafiau told the Village Voice team that everything was well with their family except water.

“We haven’t had a steady water supply to our home for as long as I can remember,” she told the Village Voice team.

“To be honest, I’m very grateful to God that we still get to wake up with our children every day without water.”

“It’s a burden for me and my husband, especially when we need we have to fetch water from families on the inner side of my village.”

“We all know that we are blessed with land of our own to depend on, but water is the only essential need that is not readily available.”

Tafiau was working on his plantation when she was spotted by the Village Voice team.

“Sometimes we mostly rely on our small plantation at our back yard for living,” she said.

“As I’ve mentioned earlier, we hardly stretched my husband’s salary from day to day, but we always put our children as our first priority.”

“The real issue here is that we literally have no access to water besides the rain.”

“We are not pretty sure of the problem, but I think the government’s water cannot reach our residence, so everyone who stays there does not have proper water access.”

“And you know, if there’s no rain, my children and I have to walk to the inner part of the village to fetch water because we all know how the weather is, most of the days are sunny.”

Tafiau hopes that one day their water woes will be addressed. 

“We are looking for a water tank so we can store water for our family, especially our children; it will also save us time from walking for a distance to collect water.”

“This has always been the case and I know that my ancestors had faced such difficulties during their time as well.” 

“So having no water access is definitely not a new issue in our village.”

By Ilia L Likou 02 January 2018, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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