When Climate Change Steals Childhood

Climate change isn’t just about weather—it’s about water, time, and who pays the price. This week, we follow the story of Sabina Riwo and explore how water scarcity shaped her childhood, and how it’s still shaping the lives of girls across the globe.

Transcript

Good morning, afternoon, or evening. Whatever it is, wherever you happen to find yourself today, I hope you're doing amazing. I’m Dave, and thank you so much for joining me on Running My Mouth Off.

And this week, we’re talking about someone whose story, well kinda stuck with me when I read it. Her name was Sabina Riwo and her story was first written about in 2017, when she was 23 and a mother of three. She lives in Kenya and had been making some pretty long walks at the time for water since she was seven, and, at the time that the article was written, she had only recently been allowed to stop those daily walks.

That was eight years ago. I haven’t seen an update since then. I hope she’s doing alright. But even if she isn’t, her story still matters. Because that’s what she lived through—that daily walk for water—that’s a reality is still happening all over Africa today.

Here’s a little more about Sabina though.

[A Day in Sabina’s Life] 

Sabina lived in Kenya’s Northern Rift Valley and, at the time, she was carrying seventy pounds of water on her back. Every day. Twice a day, since she was 7. And, when her walks ended, when she stoped carrying that water, she weighed probably somewhere around a hundred pounds or so.

She’d make these trips though for water and scoop this water out of a river where animals drank, bathed, and, well, did what animals do in the water… and what kids sometimes do in pools. And, I’m going to say this anyway, what the heck—I used to be a lifeguard, and when we saw something in the pool that really shouldn’t be there, we’d call out something like, 'Snickers Bar! Everyone out of the pool!” And everybody got out of the pool while we cleaned it. Maybe that’s a little TMI, but realistically, that’s the kind of water that Sabina’s community survived on, that’s what they had to drink, except without the chlorine and the lifeguards to clean things up."

When this water was brought it home though, there wasn’t time even to boil it. She and her family just drank it right as it was. And they got sick. In fact, at the time of the article’s writing, nine people in her area had recently died of cholera.

Sabina didn’t go to school, she simply couldn’t. She was the first daughter, and in her culture, that meant she was responsible for water, for firewood, cooking, childcare. In the 24 hours a journalist who wrote the article spent with her, Sabina sat down to rest for a total of twelve minutes. And that was her life. She’d get up around 4:30 to 5:30, ran around and worked all day, and finally knocked off right around 8:30 at night, then she’d go to sleep, and got up to do it all over again the next day,  and the day after that and the day after that, you get the picture.

[The Bigger Picture] 

Sabina’s story might sound extreme for those of us living here in the developed world, but it’s not, it’s not at all unusual, it’s actually a very, very common tale. 

Check out this fact: around the world, women and girls spend about two hundred million hours a day, that’s in one day, fetching water. This time comes at the cost of education, safety, and rest. And it comes at the cost of childhood.

In places where water is, well, a long walk away or, just dangerous to access, for a lot of reasons, girls are often forced to drop out of school because there’s just no time for that. Some are married off early. Others get abducted at the water source. In Sabina’s region, things like forced marriage and female genital mutilation, they’re not fringe practices or things that happened every now and then—they’ve become normalized, and now they’re seen as kind of a right of passage. 

Becoming a wife means that you’re able to carry water; means that you’re able to cook for the family and bear children. It means proving yourself through suffering, not through choice. And that kind of thinking shapes how girls see their place in the world from a very young age. Again, this is something that becomes normalized, that’s their existence, it’s all they know. 

And it’s easy to dismiss this as some sort of far away issue if you’re not faced with it on a daily basis. I’ve actually seen shades of this mindset elsewhere as well, in places—like Indonesia, where I spend a good bit of time working with factories….

I’m out there maybe three or four times a year and I’ve over heard women say things like, “Well, he’s my husband, I have to listen to him,” or “He’s a doctor, I have to listen to him,”, things like that. Sometimes, when I hear this, the advice or behavior associated with it, it’s just crazy. That kind of deference, it’s not at all about respect—it’s about being trained not to question authority, even though it’s hurting you. And that mindset starts  very early on in life. Again, it’s normalized.

Keep in mind that some of these cultures are incredibly patriarchal, basically what the guy says, goes. Parts of Indonesia are pretty well developed but, even there, I see it play out in some pretty, we’ll just say, shocking ways.

To be fair though, I have seen marriage situations, even within this patriarchal mindset, work out, incredibly well. There are a lot of couples who have amazing marriages. But, it takes a very special guy. Fortunately, there are a lot of special guys out there. 

 But this patriarchal reality, that’s one of those things that have  become normalized, and that’s Sabina’s world.  

Now, climate change is making everything worse, it’s kind of throwing a huge wrench into things. Across sub-Saharan Africa, droughts, floods, and unpredictable rainfall are disrupting access to clean water. Check out some of these facts: 

- Globally, flash floods have become 20 times more frequent between 2000 and 2022. And the duration of droughts has risen by 29% since 2000.

That’s globally, now let’s drill down into Africa…

- 1 in 3 people on the continent that is Africa experience water security issues, 1 in 3. 

- In Sudan, and this was taken from a report in 2023, over 7,700 cholera cases have been reported this year alone—more than 1,000 in children under five.

- In Ethiopia, food insecurity has soared by 175% over the past five years, with 22 million people struggling to find their next meal. 

Just for a reference point, Ethiopia has about 129 million people living in it, so that represents, that 22 million, represents about 17% of the country’s population. Just sit with that for a second—that’s nearly one in six people. That’s more than half the population of California and about a third the population of the UK. Numbers that size, it’s not just a number, that’s an entire cross-section of a country, waking up hungry and going to bed without knowing if there’s going to be food tomorrow.

Let’s move on though with yet more uplifting facts…

• In Kenya, over 53,000 square miles of land have become drier between 1980 and 2020, which has decimated crops and livestock. 

• In Somalia, one failed rainy season, that’s just one, is pushing one million more people into crisis-level hunger, raising the total to 4.4 million, or 24% of the population. Again, that’s like 1 in 4.

And I think I’m going to skip this last fact and just move on, I could literally quote facts like this for, well, a long time, there are many, many more, but that’s just a snapshot of what’s happening in Sabina’s world.

I’m gonna take a slight digression here because hey, it’s kinda how I roll. 

One of the hallmarks of climate change that we’re seeing is inconsistency of rainfall. We hear about things like droughts but, even in the years where a normal amount of rainfall comes, it’s often a case where the rain doesn’t show up throughout the season, as normally happens. It’s a thing that shows up in spurts; we see no rain for a while, even during the rainy season, then it’ll come in hard and it will come very fast. So, even though the total amount seasonal rainfall might remain consistent, the timing of the rain has altered fairly significantly. And when that sudden rain does come, because things like the ground isn’t prepared to accept it, we see an increased incidence of flash floods. Again, recall that, global fact that flash flood have become 20 times more frequent between 2000 and 2022.

A bit more of a digression but it’s something that I heard and it was like a, “whoa”, kind of thing. 

I was listening to a roundtable last year on Women’s education, there were three girls who took part in this panel. And one of the panelists was a woman who grew up in sub-saharan Africa. She said that, when boys grow up, they do things like climb trees, pretty normal, right? But girls aren’t allowed to climb trees, because, in her words, it makes them “less valuable” — not exactly sure what she meant by that, but those were her words, that’s what she said. So, when flash floods do show up and, again, these are her thoughts, boys can climb a tree to escape, because they’ve done it before, they’re good at it, it’s something that they know how to do. Girls though? I’m just going to leave that one right there….

Admittedly though, It’s hard to talk about all this of stuff though without sounding like an alarmist, again that’s not my intention. But there is a reality—when water becomes scarce or it becomes inconsistent, and crops fail, and basic sanitation falls apart, girls, like Sabina, are typically the ones who first pay the price. They lose school. They lose safety. And sometimes, they’re traded into marriage just so their families can survive. Wrap your head around that one for a minute. Imagine that you’re a father and you and your family are having trouble, you’re just struggling to survive, What do you do? Trade your daughter for basic necessities. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? But these aren’t reasonable places.

But back to the school thing. When girls don’t go to school, there are whole host of ripple effects. Firstly, they’re more likely to marry early, face violence, and stay trapped in poverty. Their kids are more likely to grow up hungry and they’re not going to be uneducated either. Basically, when a girl doesn’t go to school, her life is pretty much determined for her the second she’s born. But when they do go to school—when they get that shot—the odds start to shift. Health improves. Incomes rise. Communities, on the whole, begin stabilize. There’s an African proverb goes like this: “If you educate a man, you educate one individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a community.” That’s actually one of my favorite quotes, and it really is that true. Education is a game changer for girls and, by extension, for entire communities. And all of that opportunity is lost because those of trips to water sources that need to be made.

[ Faith’s Story] 

Before moving on, think about what you were doing when you were 7 years old. And, as I was saying that I was realizing, wow, this really does not flow, does it? Anyways, moving on…7 years old, what were you doing? If you can remember that far back. When I was seven, I was doing things like riding bikes with my friends, I was going to pool parties, eating popsicles, staying out entirely too late in those warm summer nights, playing hide and seek, tag, or whatever, basically doing everything a kid should be doing, right?

Enter another 7 year old girl named Faith. She lives in Kambu, Kenya, and until recently, like Sabina, she spent part of every day walking to collect water. Not from a well, but from a dam. And the water there, again it’s dirty, contaminated by livestock, doing what livestock do in water, more Snickers Bar alerts, without the lifeguards to clean the pool. Again, that’s the only water they had available to them. So, either Faith would help out fetching water, or things for the family would get, even tougher.  And Faith, like so many other girls around the world, helped carry it home, this time, eleven pounds of it on her back. Multiple times a day, every single day.

She said this though and it made me go, “wow”, “If I didn’t need to go collect water, I would play football with my friends.” That statement right there, what she wants to be doing. That’s what she wanted to be doing, she wanted to, just be a kid. To run around, laugh, go to school, play tag, and dream about what normal 7-year old girls dream about.

Faith's best friend Esther was in the same boat. Both girls were missing school, there were both were getting sick by that water, and both were losing time they couldn't afford to lose. And when you’re that young, your time is everything. It’s how you learn, how you grow, how you become who you are. But their childhoods were being shaped not by what they loved or wanted to be doing, but by what they were forced to carry.

That’s what happens when the only available water makes you sick. When your health, your energy, your future—are all wrapped up in a yellow jug strapped to your back.

[What Changed] 

But for Faith and Esther, along with Sabina, there was a very positive turning point. There are a lot of organizations who work on this issue, one of them being Unicef. A clean water project came to Sabina’s village and provided them clean running water for her house, along with about 100,000 other people in the area. For Sabina though, her kids stopped getting sick. She was able to stop those trips for water and was eventually opened up a tea shop. And the community was able to finally and consistently irrigate their crops. And Faith and Ester are now able to be school aged girls.

Sabina though, said this, “I have now rested from going to the river.”

Just hang with that for a second. Her biggest transformation in life wasn’t real flashy. It was rest. It was time. It was the chance to stop surviving, doing the things that it takes only to survive, and to start living.

[Closing] 

Again, that was 8 years ago when we last heard from Sabina, I have no idea what happened after that story was written. But I know what could happen for the next Sabina. Or the next Faith. Or the next Esther. Or the next seven-year-old girl walking for water right now. Again, take the distance, take the heat, take the dust, take all of that out of it, and there’s still those dangers that can happen when someone sees a 7 year old girl on her own.

When we give girls their time back, we give them everything else too. A chance to learn. We give them a chance to grow, a chance to rest, giving them the chance to, well, be little girls. 

And there are people doing that work. Again, in Sabina’s case, it was Unicef that helped bring clean water to her village. And there are a lot of organizations like that—a lot of boots on the ground, if you will, fighting the good fight every day. But sometimes, it feels like they’re trying to hold back a tidal wave with a few brooms.

If you’re looking for a way to help—one real, tangible thing you can do—consider supporting an organization like Unicef. They’re not just drilling wells and handing out water. They’re handing people their lives back. And that might sound cheesy, but it’s actually true, I’ve seen this work, I’ve seen it play out, I’ve just seen it. And it’s huge. 

And with that, I think that I’m going to stop this right here, sounds like kind of a sudden stopping point but let’s move on.

What’s up next? One issue that hits me every time I’m in Indonesia, is the idea of how patriarchy can go so wrong. And I’ve seen how climate change doesn’t just hit hard—it hits unfairly.

So next week, we’re talking about power, we’re talking about patriarchy, and we’re talking about the planet. How the systems that keep women and girls stuck in those margins, are the same ones that leave them most exposed when the storms roll in or the rains don’t come. And why solving climate change might just require a shifting of power—at almost every level. That’s what’s up next.

Again, I’m Dave and thank you so much for joining me on running my mouth off, I hope you have an amazing week.