AMER OUALI, Algiers | Tuesday
THE drought-stricken people of Algeria are praying in the mosques for rain as the skies stay desperately blue and water-rationing makes life increasingly difficult.
For weeks Algerians have been walking about in summer T-shirts with no sign of winter arriving, their eyes fixed on the clear blue sky in the hope of spying rain clouds.
Last week the Ministry of Religious Affairs called on the imams to hold prayers in the mosques to entreat god to send rains.
The ministry urged the faithful “to repent, to draw closer to god, to carry out good deeds and to fast before reciting this prayer.”
“Unfortunately the weather is getting better and better and there is no prospect of rain in the near future,” the weather man moaned on Monday on national radio.
Algeria has seen only a few rain showers in recent weeks from brief thunderstorms which failed to do anything to raise water levels in the country’s dams.
Authorities introduced rationing on October 7 with water supplies cut to one day out of three and only 15 hours’ supply on those days.
Even the city’s posh areas, usually spared such cuts, have been hit. “Our daily showers are just a memory,” lamented a housewife who lives in the Telemly neighbourhood on the capital’s heights.
On water days, residents of the upper storeys in apartment blocks stay up late to collect their water ration in jerrycans.
In neighbourhoods where the drinking fountains are still functioning, families send the children after school to collect water in jerrycans which they transport in wheelbarrows or carts.
The more enterprising subsequently sell on the water for 200 dinars ($2,70) a cubic metre.
In some of the capital’s suburbs, water is distributed by tractors hauling tankers, as in the countryside, while the manufacture of containers which people install on their balconies has become a cottage industry.
“This country will never solve its water problem,” exulted a man who sells the containers.
The Keddar dam, which essentially serves the capital, has reserves of only 18-million cubic metres from a total capacity of 145-million. It could dry up completely by the middle of December, unless the rain comes.
By then water will be supplied to residents on only one day out of five if the drought persists, a water company representative warned.
Algeria possesses just 48 dams which can collect only 1,5-billion cubic metres of water a year while total demand is for three billion cubic metres.
To compound the problem, the country’s network of water mains is outdated, with many millions of cubic metres wasted every day from leaks.
Outside the capital, other cities have also been affected by the drought. In the Annaba and Skikda regions in the east of the country, rationing has sparked riots. – AFP