Mennonite Central Committee

First Person: Ali Abd Al-Karim Al-Faqih

From the September/October 2007 issue of "A Common Place"

We have running water only once or twice a week. I remember times when my family had just one bucket of water to divide between drinking and cleaning. When we wash clothes or dishes, we save the leftover water for our garden.

My wife and I live with our eight children, our daughter-in-law, our three grandchildren and my father. In January 2006, MCC and a Palestinian organization helped my family build an underground cistern that holds more than 80 cubic meters of water. Whenever it rains, the ­cistern fills with water from our roof.

Thanks to the cistern, my family has the water we need for ourselves and for our garden. We grow squash, tomatoes, beans, chickpeas and other fruits and vegetables. If we didn’t have a cistern, we wouldn’t have water to grow anything.

There are about 1,500 people in my village, and we need more water projects. Israel controls most of the wells in our area of the West Bank, and we have to buy our water from the Israeli company that pumps the wells. The village is going into debt to pay for the water.

I have enough water for my house, for my children and for my land, and I would like to see other people in my community have the same privilege that I have.

I work as a stone-cutter in a quarry next to the village. Before the second intifada (Palestinian uprising) began in 2000, I worked full-time and earned 3,000 sheckels (about $750 U.S.) per month. Now, because the economy is worse, I can only work about two weeks per month and I earn about a third as much. Every month, the cistern allows us to save about 500 sheckels ($125 U.S.) by growing our own fruits and vegetables and about 100 sheckels ($25 U.S.) by not buying water.

There are five Israeli settlements near our village. Com­pared with us, the Israeli settlers have an excellent life. They have sewer systems, running water seven days a week and good roads that we are not allowed to use.

Our village does not have a sewer system, and we need one. Each household stores its sewage underground, and leaking wastewater causes a lot of diseases. It pollutes the air, destroys the agricultural soil and causes problems between neighbors.

Ali Abd Al-Karim Al-Faqih lives in Marah Rabah village in the Bethlehem governorate of the West Bank. With financial support from MCC, Applied Research Institute —  Jerusalem, a Palestinian organization, built 10 cisterns in Marah Rabah in 2006 and is currently developing sewage treatment facilities for 180 households in the West Bank.

Sept/Oct 2007 issue PDF version (1.3 meg)