In many parts of Asia-Pacific, a region facing staggered development, two-thirds of the world’s poor live on less than US$2 a day, about 669 million people lack access to fresh drinking water, and 2 billion are without proper toilets.

 

This lack of safe water and sanitation, says the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is “the world’s single cause of illnesses where the toll on children is especially high”. Take, for example, malnutrition, cholera and diarrhoea, which are linked to about a quarter of all child deaths and kill more children than AIDS does each year.

 

UNICEF also predicts other serious repercussions, including girls being denied education because their schools lack decent sanitation facilities, women being forced to spend large parts of their day fetching water and poor farmers who are less productive because of illnesses. In other words, it says, without water, sanitation and hygiene, sustainable development is impossible.

 

Professor Seetharam Kallidaikurichi E., director of the Institute of Water Policy at the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy, thinks there is a huge challenge to address Asia’s water crisis today.

“People often take water for granted, especially in Asian societies where…there are lots of economic activities that have significantly polluted our water bodies,” he says. “It’s as if we are mortgaging our future.”

 

Left: For most of her life, farmer Zheng Feng Xin, 70, who is of Hani minority descent and lives in a rural mountainous village in Yunnan, used to fetch up to 40 kilograms of water at least thrice a day. Showers were a luxury, as her village did not have a stable source of water. Since Lien Aid built taps that bring water straight to her home, her life has changed for the better with daily showers and more time spent in the fields.

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

The Children of Mekong is a multimedia website project that hopes to humanise water and sanitation issues in Asia through the lens and notepads of three young journalists from Singapore.

 

Although much has been written about these issues in news reports and research papers, we believe in the power of experience in helping to communicate the situation in rural areas where access to potable water and toilets remains a pipe dream. Through our journey, which took us from floating communities in Cambodia to Vietnam’s rice fields and China’s mountain villages, we hope to create more conversation about life in the less-developed parts of Asia.

 

Left: Waste management is a big problem in Bala village, located in a mountainous region near Xishuangbanna, Yunnan. Out of the village’s 34 households, only four have modern toilets while the others practise open defecation in their backyards or in the forest. Jie San, 38, a tea and herbs farmer, has been saving up for years to build a shower and toilet in his house for his family.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Farmers in rural mountainous Yunnan commonly practise terrace farming, where they spend most of their days working on step-like terraces designed to slow down the rapid run-off of irrigation water.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Two women from an ethnic minority tribe near Xishuangbanna take an evening bath in the Lancang Jiang, also known as the upper end of the Mekong River.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Cambodian children attending a kindergarten in a village in the Kampong Speu province in Phnom Penh are taught to wash their hands after playtime.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

In 2010, Lien Aid built a floating water treatment plant to discourage the hazardous practice of drinking from the river. Owned by the community under a social entrepreneurship programme, the plant sucks in raw water from the Tonle Sap River below and cleanses it of micro organisms with ultraviolet radiation.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

A mother and her child bathe in a lake full of water lilies. In rural Cambodia, such practices are common owing to the lack of modern toilet and bathroom facilities.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Despite its obvious murky colour and foul smell, many villagers living in floating communities on the Tonle Sap River still turn to river water for cooking.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

In a bid to combat water and soil contamination from the practice of fishpond latrines and encourage villagers to progress, Lien Aid recently introduced floating latrines to the community.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

In the Mekong Delta province in Vietnam, fishpond latrines, where villagers defecate into ponds through a raised structure supported by thin wooden planks, have long been the way of life.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Le Truong Tong, 11, lives with his family of six in a wooden hut along the main road in the Binh Hoa Truong commune in the Mekong Delta Province. As they do not have a toilet or shower in their house, they have to shower in the river or drink from a neighbour’s well.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo

 

 

Teacher Vo Thi Ngoc Bich, 33, teaches her students at Binh Hoa Truong Primary School the importance of brushing their teeth.

 

 

Text and photos by Jean Qingwen Loo