Susan Murcott is a Boston-area engineering consultant. This is an adaptation of an article which first appeared in the newsletter Crabgrass.

A poem from the Therigatha, spoken by the slave woman Punnika and translated in The First Buddhist Women begins: "I am a water carrier. Even in the cold I have always gone down to the water." Punnika lived 2500 years ago, but her water-carrying descendants are seen wherever one travels in Asia. Women are the carriers of water, as well as the caretakers of water; they perform the most basic tasks. In this sense, women are the caretakers of life.

I had translated that Therigatha poem from Pali into English some 20 years ago. But recent experiences have made Punnika's life more real to me as I have had the chance to meet and know some of the women who carry the water. The 1st International Conference on Women and Water, held in Varanasi, India in 1996, and the 2nd International Conference on Women and Water in Kathmandu, Nepal, were outcomes of a workshop on women and water conducted at the 1995 United Nations Women's Conference in Beijing. I had attended the Indian conference and I travelled to Kathmandu last August. It was the first time I had ever been to either Nepal or India and the invitations to attend these conferences were an unexpected opportunity to integrate my Buddhist past with my professional water engineering present. This piece, then, is less a conference report than some selected personal impressions and reflections.

The Nepal conference was organized and supported by several small Asian and American NGOs, including INHURED International (Kathmandu), Business and Professional Women Nepal, and Women for Water/Friends of the Ganges (San Francisco). In addition to Nepali and American participants, we came from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Germany, and Australia. Of about 75 Nepali women, perhaps half were peasant women, some of whom had walked long distances to attend. This wasn't a typical conference of the rich and well-educated-those of us who obtain our water by turning on a faucet and who rarely give water another thought. It was a meeting of women from one world-the water-faucet world-with women from another world-where heavy burdens of water are carried daily and where children die on account of water-borne diseases. The Nepali peasant women who walked to this conference did so because water is a life and death matter.

As I was packing my bags and preparing my thoughts, I asked myself: "Why are we holding an event devoted to women and water?" Common sense as well as my work around the world as a water and sanitation engineer had taught me that water is for everyone-women and men. Indeed, water is for all life, not just human life. So why women and water?

I could think of three reasons why we might be interested in women and water-two practical; the third, philosophical. First, we might be interested because women have a big responsibility and suffer a great deal on account of scarce and/or polluted water, particularly in developing countries. According to UN statistics, in 1990 1.23 billion people did not have adequate access to clean drinking water and 2.1 billion people did not have access to adequate sanitation. Those numbers are increasing. Women must carry water long distances from remote sources. When children or other family members become sick on account of water-borne diseases, diseases which are preventable and which have largely been eradicated from the developed world in the past 100 years, women must care for those who are ill.

Second, we might be interested because women are often not empowered to make important decisions about water. As I well know from my own engineering education and practice, women are a minority in the water engineering and management professions; decisions about water are often made by men. Sometimes these decisions are in the best interests of all; at other times, there are serious oversights that are the result of women's exclusion. These decisions might be as simple as the design of a latrine or repair of a pump handle or as major as a decision to build a multi-million dollar hydro-electric dam or water treatment plant. For example, in the Shahuji Maharaj district of Uttar Pradesh, India, tribal women have trained as hand-pump mechanics. The reason? In this land of low water tables and absent irrigation facilities, the only sources of water are shallow wells. But the male-dominated agency, the Jal Nigam, responsible for fixing the pumps had two mechanics to cover 930 wells scattered across 1000 square kilometers. "It is better that we learn to fix the pumps ourselves instead of waiting for days for the Jal Nigam to fix our pumps, " explains Chamela, one of the illiterate Banda women who challenged caste, chauvinism, and even prejudice within her own family to learn this essential skill.

The third reason we might be interested in women and water is because we recognize the fact of our mutual interdependence and are interested in promoting the health and well-being of all life on earth. What women and water have in common is that both are the source of life. Why are rivers, such as the Bagmati in Nepal or the Ganges in India, thought of as goddesses? Because with such rivers, there is life, without them, there is no life. And why have women always been revered throughout history and across cultures-it is because we are, among our myriad other lives and roles, mothers and healers and caretakers of life.

I knew these things theoretically and professionally. In my years as a water engineer, I had traveled and worked in many developing countries: Mexico, Brasil, Eastern Europe, China, Russia. But I had worked with the engineers and technical elite in the world's mega-cities. I had not known the women who suffer on account of water pollution and water scarcity. In Kathmandu and Varanasi I saw the bond between women, the caring, the clear and unmistakable intention to heal, the love and grace of all the women who attended. So many powerful images:

The elderly yet stunningly beautiful women. Krishna, from Western Nepal, who walked two days, then took a bus one more day to attend. She had been raped at 16, and abused by two husbands, but in recent years had reclaimed her independence and dedicated herself to teaching others about water and sanitation...

Meeting and spending time with a young boy before the conference, who loved so many of the same things my husband and I love-cultural and historical sites, mountains, hiking in the outdoors. I guessed he was about eight years old, then found out he was actually 14. "Why was he so small?" I asked. At the conference, I learned the shocking statistic that 60% of Nepali children are stunted because their young bodies have not retained essential nutrients on account of diarrheal and other water-borne diseases...

The young, uneducated girl-wife from the Terrai region who addressed the Chief Guest, Ms. Sailaja Acharya, Deputy Prime Minister for Water Resources, at the closing ceremony, telling her that she carries 30 lbs of water three or four hours each day. Such hard work is the everyday job of rural Nepali women (and 80% of Nepal's population is rural). Of course, because they must carry water to support their families' most basic needs, they cannot spend time in other essential activities, such as education (only 23% of Nepali women are literate) or economic development...

My meeting with Veer Bhadra Mishra, founder of the Swatcha Ganga (Clean Ganges) Campaign, who, as the mahant of the Sankat Mochan Temple and in the tradition of his ancestors, has performed ritual bathing in the now grossly polluted Ganges almost every day of his life, but who, as an engineer and department chair at the Benares Hindu University, has also tried to spearhead the Ganges clean-up. In our brief talk, I asked him about his legs and feet: "What is this disability?" " I contracted polio as a child," he told me. Another preventable water-borne disease, the same polio that confined my own grandmother to a wheelchair for over six decades...

The Bengali women who asked to be allowed the opportunity to organize the 3rd International Conference on Women and Water in the year 2000. So much work, no money. Who asks to do these kinds of jobs in America...

And the songs of our sisters-always we sang songs. And danced.

These were a few of the images and experiences that stay with me. There were many outstanding presentations. I want to comment here on my own presentations, because the responses they generated point to work I/we must do as one follow-up to the conference.

I described work I had done last winter in a community comprised of a monastery, hospital and village of 3000 people in North Burma. More that half of the 7000 patients treated at this hospital were there on account of preventable waterborne diseases. I was invited by a Western Buddhist group, quietly affiliated with Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, to set up a small water testing lab, survey the water supplies, test the water, and recommend treatment options and siting. We established that people were getting sick from water-borne pathogens and that water treatment works; that high turbidity is associated with bacterial contamination; that the age-old method of letting highly turbid water settle in large jugs in kitchens and courtyards is a very effective example of local water wisdom; and we confirmed technically through our bench-scale and pilot tests, "sedimentation experiments indicated that substantial reductions in turbidity are a function of long detention times under conditions of natural gravity settling." We achieved improvements in turbidity removal using local Burmese aluminum sulfate and other metal salt products such as ferric chloride

I drew from these key findings to demonstrate to the assembled women in Kathmandu one of most simple and easy-to-communicate processes of water purification, coagulation. In this demonstration, I collected a 6-liter sample of polluted water from the Bagmati River in Kathmandu. It was characteristically a dirty brown and full of particles. I then obtained a sample of raw aluminum sulfate, which is a locally available metal salt in rock form, the identical, commonly available compound I had tested in Burma. I ground the aluminum sulfate into a powder, weighed 1 gram into a plastic bottle and added 100 milliliters of tap water to make a 1% solution. Then I showed that when a small amount of this solution is added as a "coagulant" into the 6-liter jug of dirty water and mixed vigorously, large particles called flocs are formed on account of an electro-chemical reaction and settle out quickly by gravity. Through this coagulation process, standard in most drinking water treatment plants around the world, the water becomes much cleaner. In a demonstration like the one I was performing, the effect is visually striking.

A personal challenge arose from the response to my Myanmar and "water cleaning" demonstration. The Nepali peasant women had said from the outset that the reason they had come to this conference was to learn how to clean up their water supplies. I knew that my talk had been simple and relevant. It was "science for the people," easy to grasp, using everyday tools available even to these poor Nepali women. Now the women told me that on account of my demonstration, they knew what to do! This startled me because I hadn't realized that they would take my demonstration as the prescribed route to clean water in local Nepali villages. It was a step. Only a step. I had barely begun to learn about the specific water problems of Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. This was my first exposure to their water problems. I hadn't anticipated that what I said would be taken as the answer.

I was seeing that there were two core problems in this region of South and West Asia: (1) water scarcity, hence the need for women to carry heavy loads of water 3-6 hours per day, and (2) water quality, hence the need for women to spend another large portion of their lives and hearts caring for the sick, especially caring for their sick and dying children (One in three children in Nepal die of waterborne diseases before the age of three). The water quality problem is a simple engineering problem. The challenge to me was how to give women, especially rural women, direct control over their water quality. Just as we in the West want our personal computers and private automobiles, the Nepali peasant women want to have control in their own hands,, instead of being controlled by outside forces-upstream villages; local, state, or national government agencies; whatever.

On the second day of the conference, I met the delegation of women from Bangladesh. They showed me pictures of the arsenic-induced diseases as they told their horrific tale.

Bangladesh is the size of the state of Wisconsin, but has a population of 120 million people, making it the most densely populated country in the world, with over 2000 people per square mile. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world with a GNP of just US $230 per capita. The region has three sources of water-surface water, rain water, and ground water. Although there are a great number of rivers, surface water is highly contaminated. Therefore, in the past several decades, as many as one million deep wells, called "tube wells," have been drilled into Ganges alluvial deposits in Bangladesh and also in neighboring West Bengal, India.

The idea had been that deep well groundwater supplies would provide a clean drinking water source. However, in the last few years it has been discovered that this groundwater is contaminated with arsenic. Moreover, until recently, the international aid agencies and governments that drilled these deep wells had never tested for arsenic! The arsenic, of natural origin in the arsenic-rich pyrite in the aquifer sediments, is showing up in very high concentrations in well water, probably on account of over-pumping of the groundwater.

Consumption of this water source has led to widespread disease and death. It is estimated that as many as 77 million people may be affected. Of course, it is the women who are caring for the sick, deformed, and dying. And it was that delegation of Bangladeshi women who asked to be allowed the opportunity to organize the next international conference on women and water in the year 2000 in order to carry the work forward.

In the final day's session, we broke into four groups: international, national, local, and "final statement." In the international group, we were not to say "what should be done" but "what we personally will do." First, I committed to interfacing with several of the Nepali women with technical backgrounds so that together we could come up with a simple and inexpensive water treatment solution for Nepali peasant women. That's the "simple" challenge. Second, I committed to help organize the Year 2000 Third International Women and Water Conference in Bangladesh.

The big challenge which remains in my mind as I write this article is the 77 million people of Bangladesh drinking water from deep wells contaminated with arsenic-wells proposed and funded by the Western technical and engineering elite of which I am a part.

Two weeks later, attending a meeting at the UN Development Program in New York with some Japanese colleagues, I passed the UNICEF gift shop and saw some posters of rural children from developing countries. Above each child the poster said: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And below each child it answered "ALIVE!" This, I thought, is the short story of women and water.