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April 1, 2010

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

Agony for the elderly as drought takes hold

Source: Xinhua | April 1, 2010, Thursday | Print Edition

LIU Shiyou treks across the craggy mountains near his home in Yunnan Province everyday, but not for leisure - the 92-year-old is scouring for water.

With his plastic barrel and ladle, he travels 10 kilometers to a small spring where he catches a trickle of dust-laden water. Liu gave up smoking his water pipe shortly after the once-in-a-century drought began to plague his village in the suburbs of Kunming, the provincial capital.

From time to time he looks up to the sky and prays for rain, and he is always delighted to see dark clouds. But a weekend drizzle did little to even wet the cracked, thirsty ground.

Across the worst-hit counties of Yunnan, the fields are practically bare. Reservoirs and ponds have dried up - dead fish at the bottom are the only reminder that there used to be water.

At least half of the water Liu carries home is saved in a kettle for cooking and drinking. His wife keeps the other half in a small basin, with which the couple wash themselves and their clothing. At the end of the day, Liu feeds whatever is left of the water - always a gruel-like, dusty paste - to the pig dying of thirst.

Liu and his wife manage to care for themselves without bothering their sons who work as migrant laborers in the city to bring home the bacon for their family.

Photographs of Liu and his wife and their battle with thirst posted on sina.com must have moved thousands to tears. Across the drought-hit provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and China's youngest municipality, Chongqing, elderly people are struggling with the drought.

Despite all-out efforts to dig more wells and seed clouds to induce rain, the situation remains grave.

In Guizhou Province, nearly 70 percent of the 18,000 reservoirs have virtually dried up, with water levels falling far below the lowest sluice valve, the provincial flood prevention and relief control office said this week, adding that 10 percent of the reservoirs had dried up completely. While villagers trek long hours for water, horses sometimes break their backs under the heavy workload.

In Nongpengtun, a tiny village with 44 residents in Napo County, Baise City, in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, 10 villagers - mostly women and elderly - a horse and 20 plastic barrels hunt for water.

Each day, they hike 5 kilometers to a temporary water storage facility where a county government wagon delivers water to villagers in the rural community. Each person carries at least 30kg of water on a single trip, while the horse carries up to 50kg.

"We had three horses before," said Wei Simian, 62. "One of them died two weeks ago and the other one has seriously injured his back."

Li Guangjie, 38, came home in December after years of working at factories in Guangzhou Province, hoping to settle down with his bride. His wife, however, stunned by the poverty and lack of water, left him within four weeks.

In Yunnan Province, up to 2 million people are expected to migrate for work this year and offset the economic losses incurred by the persistent drought, up from 1.2 million last year, said Bai Enpei, secretary of the provincial committee of the Communist Party of China.



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