Women in Loovikuny village encounter hardship situation because of climate change to the area which caused by drought. In earlier time 1970’s there was no such problem but due to the population in the area the situation was changed and cause many problem to women and children who are the working group in Maasai culture.
I got an opportunity to have a field visit with the Mazingira Network Tanzania (MANET) members to Loovikuny village in Monduli District-Arusha.The visit aimed at sharing ideas with the community on Participatory Learning Action (PLA) which give knowledge community to explore their problems and to work on it themselves without depends to the leaders only.That means to avoid the system of top down approach towards development of the community.
Every community member should participate on solving problems which arises in the community instead of leaving to the leaders.
There is the big hill with rocks called Loovikuny hill in the area where there is a project of quarrying stones and sand for building materials. It is established by the Ward Executive, and most of the people from town come with their trucks (lorry) to buy sand and stones and sold it to town.
The thing which shocked me while there is to see Maasai women engaged in quarrying activity on top of the hills due to hard life which they are facing caused by the heavy drought season within the area there is hunger and shortage of water at the place so they were supposed to perform the activity inorder to get money for feeding their families. Some of the women said that “we are supposed to do this dangerous activity inorder to get money to feed our family without doing that we can die all of us, because no food and water at all due to drought”. Imagine the act which supposed to be done by using graders and other machine performed by women power, due to environmental problems which facing the place. Bad enough the women were given little percentage of the amount after the selling of the sand and stones.
It is true that the area was terrible from this season as there is no water even food. In Masai culture women supposed to look for water as well as the means of cooking food. This season women facing many challenges as there is no water they used to searching water far away from their home they spent a day for one bucket of water, they said “we are supposed to keep time table whereby if it the time for fetching water we haven’t engaged on any other activities because we spend a whole day looking for water and the means which we were using is by digging rocks which stores water”.
The big challenge which facing people of Loovikuny is shortage of water as they have an idea of planting trees inorder to keep their environment but the thing is there is no even water for irrigate planted tree, this lead them to accept the environment as it is during the drought season.
Due to this, there is a need of assist the village to have water sources inorder to help this special and vulnerable group that of women who were suffering, by doing this we can save the community in general because always ‘women’s is a big nation let not it die.’ Letting women facing worse situation like what face Loovikuny womens is like causing the whole society to suffering.
Written by;
Penina Joachim-YET 2011
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