Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
Bela Vista
5 May 2008
Maputo — Residents of Bela Vista, capital of Mozambique's southernmost district of Matutuine, have been facing a serious shortage of water over the last few days, caused by sabotage of the tubing.
To obtain water, even for their basic needs, people have to fetch it from the Maputo river, but this water is unfit for human consumption.
"This is dirty water, but we have no alternative. We have to treat it with chlorine before we use it', one of the women residents in Bela Vista told AIM on Saturday.
For her part, one 12 year old girl, who identified herself as Mira, said that her job every afternoon, after returning from school, is to help her mother fetch water from the river.
Some of the Bela Vista residents have to walk more than a kilometre to get to the river for water.
However, the Matutuine administrator Mario Bombi promised that this problem should be solved by Monday, because there are teams working hard to repair the sabotaged piping.
"The pipes are the only problem, because the system itself is functioning efficiently. We have had water 24 hours a day since the rehabilitation of the system in 2007", said Bombi.
He explained that there are 60 wells and eight small systems in the entire district, but this infrastructure is not enough to supply water to all residents because people are sparsely distributed in the four administrative posts.
On the other hand, the existence of limestone soil in places such as Catuane makes it impossible to open any water source. "In those places we set up systems to collect and store rain water or we send supplies in cistern trucks", he said.
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