TWTBACD Ch.65 - The Year of Clean Water

Chapter 65

The Year of Clean Water

2063

2063: clean water flows in Kenya. Grace gets four hours back.

The Pacific Resource Extraction Technology reached operational scale in 2063. The first major deployment — a coastal installation in Kenya, the second in the Philippines, the third in Senegal — produced results that exceeded the conservative projections and fell short of the optimistic ones, which is the predictable outcome of responsible technology deployment.

In practical terms: the coastal communities within distribution range of the Kenyan installation had access to clean drinking water within four months of commissioning. The specific communities were ones where groundwater depletion had been reducing access for twenty years. The change was experienced not as a technological event but as the ending of a deprivation that had been so long-standing it had come to feel inevitable.

Adaeze Mutombo, now fifty-three, had been a primary architect of the legal framework governing the Kenyan installation. The framework included local ownership provisions, environmental monitoring requirements, and profit-sharing arrangements that she had spent three years negotiating against the commercial interests of the technology consortium.

She visited the installation in November 2063. She stood at the distribution point in a coastal village outside Mombasa and watched a woman fill a container from a tap — a new tap, in a village that had previously collected water from a well whose water table had dropped three metres in ten years.

The woman filled the container. She tasted the water. She looked at the tap. Then she looked at Adaeze.

'Every day?' the woman asked.

'Every day,' Adaeze said.

The woman's name was Grace. She had five children. She had spent four hours a day, every day, for twenty years, managing the family's water supply. Four hours a day is twenty-eight hours a week is, over twenty years, the equivalent of fourteen years of full-time work.

'What will you do with the time?' Adaeze asked.

Grace smiled. 'Whatever I want,' she said.

Adaeze flew home to Kinshasa and wrote the article that became the most widely read piece she ever published. It was titled: 'Grace's Four Hours.'