Mohamed Ag Ahmad is a man in his sixties, who lives in the countryside of the Malian village Tinsoft, near the Mauritanian borders. Mohamed explains his ordeal saying: “We are still struggling with the use of these traditional deepwells where you can only reach water after several meters in the depth of the earth. Our brothers in the villages and the countryside on the outskirts of the Mauritanian borders share our suffering as well”. He adds: “The difficulty of extracting water from the wells, which sometimes reach 40 meters in depth or more, still threatens the lives of both human beings and cattle”.
For his part, Mohammed Mahmoud Ould Arhil, a livestock breeder in the countryside of Mauritania near the borders, describes how these wells are dug and how drinking water is extracted from them. He says: “When we dig a well, we collect all our money and we work hard from sunrise to sunset without rest. The water extraction method is also very difficult. We tie a bucket that weighs almost 50 liters to a rope which length matches the estimated length of the well, and connect them to a donkey or camel to be dragged from inside the well ".
OuldArhil continues: “We do not have any means of transportation other than ourselves and our cattle, which sometimes weaken because of the drought”.
Ali Jaddou, a man in his fifties who lives in the Mauritanian village HasiAtwil, near the Malian borders, carries his buckets everyday to a well a few kilometers away from the village in search for some liters ofwater that would cover the daily drinking water ration for himself and his small family composed of his kids and grandchildren.
Ali’s situation is almost typical in all the countryside and the remote villages on the borders between the two countries, which suffer from the problem of thirst, and the absence of adequate water supplies for the population.
For his part, Moulay Mohammed, spokesperson for the organization "The Heart of Mali", which usually digs wells in the Malian countryside, especially in the border areas, says: "These and other areas of the countryside border, are really suffering from a shortage of water supplies for the animals, especially in summer”.
The same source considers that “drought is the main reason behind this lack of water resources. Mauritanian shepherds move from their lands to the Malian lands where they cause a visible increase of the demand on well waters. The same thing happens in times of drought in Mali when Malian shepherds move to Mauritanian lands in pursuit of water which creates difficulties for the Mauritanians”.
The same source pointed that: “Most of these people are always moving from one place to another, leading to a difficulty in providing some of these countryside areas with drinking water, due to the residents’ absence during the implementation of completed projects, and the absence of a special commission from the locals to track projects that are in progress. "
Sadiq Ag Oltnana is an engineer who currently lives in the Mbera camp, and who has previously participated in digging and designing a number of modern wells in the border areas and in the Malian city Lira specifically, at some point before the Malian crisis. He said that “the policy of wells construction in Mali led to vanquishing the ghost of thirst that threatened the country starting from the eighties of the previous century due to the successive years of drought in both countries”.
