Fifty Years of Selling Water
A mother of the household has carried cold water through Voinjama for most of her life. One morning, someone carried something back to her.
- Date
- Location
- Voinjama, Lofa County
- Reporting
- The Lofa24 team
- Subjects
- Community Story, Livelihoods, Women & Girls
She is fifty years old, and she sells water.
In Voinjama that is a whole job. It means buying or fetching, carrying, keeping cold what you can, and walking the same routes past the same shopfronts every day until the load is gone. It is a trade with almost no margin in it. What it earns is enough to keep a household eating, most days, and not much more than that.
Our team met her at her home, where she sat on a low stool by the door with a basin of greens beside her, and she talked to us about what that work has cost her body and what it has bought her family. She has been a street vendor for years. She is a mother. She has not stopped.
There is a habit in reporting on people like her of arriving with the conclusion already written — the struggling widow, the hard-luck case. We would rather say the plain thing: she works, the work does not pay enough, and she has kept doing it anyway.
A humanitarian who read her story asked to remain anonymous and asked us to bring her something. So we came back with a bag of rice and a set of cooking ingredients, and set them down on her step.
It is not a solution. A bag of rice buys a household weeks, not years. But it was hers, and it came because someone heard her, and that is the part worth recording.
From the visit
She told her story from the doorstep where she prepares greens each morning.
A bag of rice and cooking ingredients, delivered the same day.
Support a story
Rice, bedsheets, baby food, a repaired shopfront. Each one arrived because somebody read a story and asked what was needed.
Several of those people asked to remain anonymous. We do not collect payments on this website — get in touch and we will tell you exactly what is needed, who receives it, and what it changed.