Several residents of Nyenowroken Town, Karluway Electoral District#3 in Maryland county have complained lack of safe drinking water in the town.
Speaking to reporters during a tour of the town recently, residents said they have been faced with challenges in getting safe drinking water.
They said due to lack of hand pumps, they are constrained to fetch water from creeks for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes, which poses a serious health risk.
They disclosed that few hand pumps that were constructed in the town by some NGOs and community dwellers are damaged, so they now rely on untreated water from natural sources, such as bores, rivers, creeks, and springs.
"It is very difficult for us to get safe drinking water because most of our hand pumps are totally down; because of this many of us are forced to fetch water from the creeks for drinking, cooking, bathing and other domestic activities", they explained.
A prominent resident, Peter Washington, Jr', said the town is currently undergoing serious challenges over the lack of safe drinking water.
"We want the local authorities, including the central government to come to our rescue because we are encountering series of challenges, which include, lack of sufficient hand pumps.
As I speak to you now, we only have one hand pump but is not enough to supply the entire community with safe drinking water, and so because of that, most of us can take water from the creek for drinking", Mr. Washington added.
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He noted that considering the harm this poses to their lives by drinking untreated water, it's rightly said that water is life and from this backdrop, every human being needs to have access to safe drinking water, to avoid problems within the human body or system.
He continued that during the rainy season, the situation is worse because creeks are polluted and by that, they have to walk distances to get water from river.
"Let me say, sometimes if the rainfall heavily, we can walk a long distance to get water from the creeks or drink from dropped [rainwater] we get from top of our houses because those creeks can't be good for drinking."
He appealed to government and humanitarian organizations for intervention, adding that the challenges here are numerous. "We have few hand pumps but they are insufficient and not functioning properly to supply the entire area with safe drinking water."
