I didn’t find this in the article, and am still confused. Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? There was one example of the family spending time collecting firewood equal to time collecting water, but boiling was still missing. Also, what about filtering? You can do it with charcoal.
I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.
> Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease?
Maybe. We need to specify what makes exactly makes some water sample unsafe before we can discuss anything. Sometimes boiling helps, sometimes it makes it worse. If your concern nitrates, lead, arsenic, or other things that won't boil, then boiling just concentrates the contaminates and makes the water worse! If your concern is bacteria boiling will kill the bacteria, but the dead cells are still there which may include some poison in the bacteria.
Most filters will not remove the above either. Water is very good at dissolving a lot of nasty things that you don't want in your body (that ability enables a lot of controlled chemistry and thus life as we know it!), and once dissolved it will go through a filter. We again need to know exactly what is in the water before we can discuss if a filter works or not, otherwise we should just assume the filter is not going to make water safe.
Most of the time boiling for water purification just means bringing it briefly to a boil to kill pathogens not boiling for an extended period so there's only minimal water loss so very little concentration actually happens.
They can afford it, but fuel and energy costs are the lion's share of their expenses, in a way they aren't in rich countries.
~1/25th of my expenses are spent on paying for energy. I wouldn't think twice about using more of it.
If 1/2th of my expenses were directed towards acquiring energy, that would be a different conversation.
And they can't just go to the forest and get some firewood. Population densities in the developing world in the 21st century are such that even if there is unowned land where you can do that close enough to where you live, it won't sustain your community for very long.
The article says "D and her kids spend another 21 hours a week collecting firewood.", effectively half of a full-time job, on top of another 14 hours per week collecting water. Where do they have the time to gather excess fuel to boil water, let alone make charcoal?
I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.