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For Gailyn Johannes, mornings start harsh and early. At 6:30 am, she wakes up, cooks breakfast for her entire household, and hops on the bus. After a cigarette, she heads deep into a thicket of brush, clad in royal blue overalls and wielding poison spray.

 

It’s a trying schedule, but Johannes is happy to be employed at all. For years, the 24-year-old had tried to find steady work near her home suburb of Mamre. But with an unemployment rate of nearly 30 percent, the area has a distinct lack of opportunity.

Everything changed for Johannes last year. Tap water slowed to a trickle. Mamre’s riverbed, once filled with rushing water, went dry and became choked with trash.

 

Then a woman named Louise Stafford offered Johannes a job she didn’t even know existed—and before the drought, it hadn’t.

An hour’s drive north of Cape Town, past hundreds of kilometers of parched earth and scrubby hills, lies Atlantis. In stark contrast to its drowned namesake, Atlantis is dry—as dry as anyone around here remembers.

 

Fortunately, the town sits right next to an aquifer, an underground layer of semi-permeable rock brimming with water. The aquifer has always provided a percentage of Atlantis’s water—and soon, government officials expect, it will be its only source.

 

Last November, Cape Town officials announced that it was revamping its production capabilities around the aquifer, increasing its production from 4 to 9 million liters of water per day. The eventual goal is to take surrounding cities of Atlantis, Mamre and Pella off of Cape Town’s main water grid. But before that, they must increase its production still more—which is where Johannes and her co-workers come in.

 

From morning until late afternoon, the all-woman team, dressed in blue overalls and tomato-red t-shirts, chop away at invasive plant species that have grown around the aquifer, choking its water supply.

 

These women all have different employment histories – some held jobs before, others were single mothers, others ran their households. For all of them, the water crisis has led to opportunity.

 

“At the end of the day, we’re doing something for the community,” says Jonelene Langeveldt, another aquifer worker. “In Mamre, people are struggling with water and at the moment there is a shortage of water…We are all struggling in South Africa without water.”

 

In fact, women around the world bear the responsibility for collection and management of household water, according to the UN Women Watch. In Mamre, Johannes’s and Adonis’s mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers pulled water from the riverbed. For generations, they plunged their buckets into the current, carrying clean water back to the homes.

 

Working at the aquifer may be rewarding, but it’s also hard, demanding labor. So for an hour or so at high noon, the women lounge in the shade, sharing cigarettes and potato chips and laughing. They’ve become extremely close as a unit since they began working together, says Johannes.

 

Which is part of the goal: By the end of the year, according to community liaison Emarentia Patiencia, one of the women will take over management of the invasive species removal project. This way, they can take a more active role in conserving the town’s water supply in the tough years ahead.

For Sheree Adonis, too, the project is personal. A single mother living in the low-income suburb of Mamre, Adonis’ tap has spouted water that tastes “like bleach” since December. This water recently gave Adonis dysentery, she says, even though the provincial government has said tap water is safe to drink. Her water also shuts off occasionally and without warning. Faced with so many difficulties, Adonis has had to find new ways to provide water for her five-month-old baby, Kylie,  like buying bottled water that’s beyond her budget and spending extra time boiling the tap water that’s available.

 

As the water crisis has settled in, Cape Town’s provincial governing body, the Democratic Alliance (DA), continues to tighten restrictions on water use, adding water monitors to homes and, in some lower income areas, shutting off taps once a daily quota is reached. The overwhelming responsibility for dealing with these restrictions falls on women — who are generally in charge of feeding, watering and doing chores for the rest of their families.

THE ATLANTIS AQUIFER

It was only a decade ago that taps were installed in Mamre. But now, with the drought in full swing, the riverbed is parched, the town is desiccated and the women must rely on the river where their mothers before them had always gone. Now, to protect their source of water, Johannes and her neighbors have wedged in rocks and boulders to create a small well — they know the drought is here to stay, so they’re building their own solutions.

 

It’s not news that women tend to shoulder the burdens of unpaid domestic labor, but in the case of Cape Town’s water crisis, which is felt most directly within the home, they have come to bear the weight of environmental crisis, too. This portends a troubling trend for the future, too: As climate change impacts around the world grow stronger, it is mostly women who will have to problem-solve for their families.

"WE ARE ALL STRUGGLING IN SOUTH AFRICA WITHOUT WATER."

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