pulling
Women pulling up water using buckets, made of recycled plastic jars, from a well in Kathmandu.
The strength of these women makes the chore of collecting and transporting water, sometimes for miles, also social occasion when to exchange stories about their family, grief, beliefs, hopes and dreams.
Photo taken before the April 2015 earthquake.
Usually the first task of a Nepali woman is to get water and this role is so engrained that a newly wed woman often receives from her in-laws two water buckets as a gift.
Even if Nepal has plentiful of water, the rapid urbanization, pollution and dismal infrastructure makes its availability a real challenge.
In Kathmandu many wells dried up due to the expansion of the city as its population increased three folds from 1991 to 2001 but the infrastructure did not follow.
The Nepalese government estimates that one in five Kathmandu households has no access to a domestic water source and many of them get water once every four days to ten days for a minimum of one hour.
- www.albertomesircaphoto.com
