bati district, Takeo – At the Ang Soeng pagoda in Chambak commune, every day is as crowded as if it were Khmer New Year. Perched on bicycles and motobikes with 30-liter plastic cisterns, hundreds of villagers flock here for water, some making several trips per day.
Some villages can’t afford wells, while in others wells have run dry. The pagoda, with its two reservoirs, has one of the commune’s few remaining ample supplies of water. People from neighboring communes have also descended on the pagoda.
Commune chief Chan Yem said the water shortage is his newly elected council’s “number one priority.”
“We are worried about the water shortage here, and this is the first thing we will look at, even ahead of our administrative work,” he said. The people spend so much time transporting water back and forth that they have little time for any other work, he said.
Rural water supplies always run low at the end of the dry season. But villagers and officials from provinces ranging from Takeo in the south to Oddar Meanchey in the nothwest to Stung Treng in the northeast say this year is worse than previous ones.
Provinces all over the country are suffering severe water shortages—and it could be a month or more before the rainy season begins.
Chambak commune is lucky. Thanks to a project funded by Cambodian-Americans a few years ago, the reservoir was deepened enough to where it can hold rain water throughout the dry season.
But now, with so many others using it, villagers fear the water will dry up before the rains come.
In the Oddar Meanchey province border town of O’Smach, lack of clean water is a constant complaint. Residents consume muddy water from a dirty canal at a price of about 30 baht ($0.70) per barrel.
“Besides many other problems here, we face a lack of clean water,” said Sean Samon, a motorcycle taxi driver in O’Smach. “The water is too dirty to drink.”
A Dutch NGO called ZOA recently dug the first large reservoir in O’Smach, but it won’t start filling with rain water until the rainy season.
In Stung Treng province, where most of the population lives near the Mekong river, residents of one village just 4 km from its banks are going thirsty, said Buy Kimsreang, the rural water supply and sanitation liaison officer at the Ministry of Rural Development.
This village’s story caught the attention of rural development officials, who are studying the possibility of building a water tower to supply remote areas. A similar project funded by the French government is being undertaken in Takeo province, Buy Kimsreang said.
Only 20 to 30 percent of Cambodians have access to enough clean water, Buy Kimsreang said. More than 100,000 wells have been dug by government and NGOs all over the country, but about one million are needed, he said.
“Water is the basic human need. If we have enough water, we can make money properly so poverty can be reduced,” said Chan Yem, the Chambak commune chief.
“If we have water, we can have everything.”
