The Negev water blog
September 24, 2008
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Graphic description of water discrepancy
Put your thumb and index finger together. That hole is the diameter of the incoming water line for an entire village of Bedouin families living in the Negev Desert in Israel. This water doesn’t come from the Israeli water grid, because this village, in official terms does not exist. In this village, like several hundreds of others, around 200 people are using a water line the size of the international hand signal for ‘everything is A-OK’.
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Electrical lines in a Bedouin township criss-cross between the homes
Whilst visiting one such unrecognized village, our group, participants in the One Land project in Ayn Hawd, was generously hosted for lunch by a town elder. Because a part of my brain is permanently in the gutter, and I had just taken photographs of miniscule makeshift water infrastructure, I was surprised to find a Western style flush loo. My curiosity got the better of me and I later asked our host (an articulate engineer) about his loo. He said that here in the Negev, like everywhere else in the world, dry toilets although possibly better suited to a tenuous situation in which every single house here has a demolition order, dry toilets simply suffer from cultural taboos. Just like everywhere else.
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Building housing the generator supplying electricity to the homes
Dang if that’s not a huge hole in the market, making dry toilets culturally desirable for everyone - and not just folks living in terrible conditions in unrecognized villages. So, who is tackling the cultural taboos associated with dry toilets and who has their heart set on making them aspirational? I’d like to introduce you to some people that I know.
- 12 Points of Blueprint Negev - at the Jewish National Fund website. Not in my name please!
An alternative initiative to Blueprint Negev is called Save the Negev. Video by F.A.S.T
Basic information on dry and composting toilets, a wikipedia jump page
and elsewhere in Israel:
The Association of Forty (Galilean Unrecognized Arab villages - photographs of water infrastructure)
Wikipedia entry on the recently recognized village of Ayn Hawd
A video about the Unrecognized Arab villages of Israel situated in the North
List of Palestinian villages depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War
debra at 17:48 | | post to del.icio.us
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Comment by Have you ever heard of Air2Water? — October 14, 2008 @ 23:06
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Comment by shopa — October 31, 2008 @ 3:05