Women, water and what it means to ‘have it all’

For millions of women and girls in poor countries, collecting water for their families each day is not just a chore—it’s a symbol of gender oppression.

I wonder what Mari Tuji would say if I asked her what it means to “have it all”?

Mari is a young mother of three, and until last year, like every mother in the community Kelecho Gerbi, Ethiopia, each day she was the first in her household to wake up and get a jump on her main chore—carrying water.

Mari’s community built a new water system in 2012, but before that, when her children were babies, she carried them on her back two hours to the river with the jerry can in her hand. And then after fetching water, she carried the full, 40-pound jerry can on her back and her babies in her arms all the way home.

Mari’s marriage was arranged when she was a child. She tried to get out of it, running away from home as a teenager to work as a maid in the capital of Addis Ababa—the only job she could find as an illiterate young woman. But her family convinced her to return and fulfill the promise they had made to her husband’s family.

When I talked to Mari before her community had started building their new system, she was excited to end her daily walk for water, but also felt that the project “will bring more peace in my home.” She explained that if she didn’t collect water before her husband returned from the fields in the morning, he would become very angry with her, saying, “This is your responsibility! Why didn’t you go earlier in the morning?”

She didn’t say it, but I suspect his anger turned violent.

The river where Mari found water for her family was not just a water hole for humans. They shared it with cattle and goats, as there was no other option for local villagers.

When Mari’s children became ill from drinking water, she carried them on foot several miles to the nearest clinic in a town called Busa. Sometimes the medicine to treat her children’s diarrhea was too expensive, or the clinic would run out of it, so Mari would walk back home with her sick child and hope the illness resolved on its own.

As Mari pointed out, they would always get sick again. Nothing had changed.

Mari said she felt she would have “everything” if she had water in her home.

My grandmother was a single mom. Her husband left her for another woman when she was pregnant with my mother. These days, we have a name for that: deadbeat dad.

But that was a different time and place, and so in order to keep her job as an elementary school teacher, my grandmother lied about her absent husband, saying he died in World War II.

My mother didn’t know the truth until she was twelve, when my grandmother remarried. And the only time my grandmother talked about my biological grandfather to us was after she had a little too much wine one night, his name was mentioned and she hissed, “that bastard!”

Based on her childhood experiences and longing for a father, my mother fought for her marriage, staying in a relationship that didn’t always make her happy. She made it clear to me from the time I was a teen that I should expect more from my marriage than she did. And I do.

But my mother was a trailblazer in other parts of her life. I vividly remember the day she and all the other female school-teachers decided to wear banned pant-suits to school instead of skirts.

My mother and my grandmother were stubborn and determined, and they told me I could do and be anything I wanted to be. At one point, when I was about twelve and living in the small rural town of Benson, Arizona, I decided I wanted be an astronaut, and my mother, truly believing I could actually do it, enrolled me in a science day-camp for budding astronauts at the University of Arizona.

The camp was thrilling, and convinced me that I was truly positioned to be the first American female astronaut.

But later that same summer, when we were on a family vacation, camping and water-skiing on a lake in rural Mexico, something I saw changed me. It was a girl, my age, carrying water home to her family.

She clearly didn’t have it all, and it was the first time I had considered how time and place are major determinants of outcomes in life. As I said to my mother then, it just wasn’t fair.

It seemed logical to me then, and now, that extremely poor women could never have the slimmest shot at having it all if their waking hours were consumed in the back-breaking task of carrying water, a job I only see men perform with the help of a donkey.

I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Kelecho Gerbi’s new water system last year and found out that Mari Tuji had been selected to be on the management committee, responsible for operating and maintaining the piped water network.

She told me that initially she was nervous about taking the position, because she had never been to school. But during the training sessions she realized she was just as capable as her more educated, male counterparts, and that she truly enjoyed learning new things.