Imagine being super thirsty and having to walk I don’t know how many miles, only to get some water. Yellowish water, mixed with sand. Warm water, all day heated by the Sun. Unbelievable, right? While we’re having crystalline, fresh, cold water in the next room of our homes, in another part of the world this unfortunate is happening. How can something so vital to life be inaccessible to millions of people?

This picture, taken in Kenya, shows a kid filling a plastic bottle with water of a puddle. Some years ago, there could be a river, where fresh water flowed hard. Nowadays, as we can see in the middle of the photo, it’s full of plastics, papers, trash and it prevents the clean water from coming down. On the left we notice an angry child, staring at the camera, with the bottle being half full. He’s alone; maybe he has no family, maybe his parents are ill and they can’t bring water, maybe they’re searching for some food while he’s taking water. This little boy is wearing a worn out, white, plain, woolen, round-necked, long-sleeved t-shirt; a pair of old, baggy, navy blue, plain trousers and a pair of small, brown, plain, a kind of cartons, flat shoes. Perhaps, he made his own shoes with some cartons that he found over there. He seems angry, he’s fed up with the present situation and maybe he’s not feeling well. This contaminated water produces illnesses and infections due to all the dirt that contains and a lot of people end up dying for this reason. Talking about the landscape, in the background there is some water coming down with more plastics and remains. On both sides of this river, if we can call it like this, there are some big rocks and soil. It seems a place in the middle of nowhere, far away from the population.

Honestly, this portrait breaks my heart.  It’s simple, not many things appear in the photo; it’s shocking, a little boy, alone, angry, taking dirty water; it’s realistic, the truth about what it’s happening in the world; it’s unfair, for what all these people is suffering. I hope that you are thinking like me, it hurts to see the cold reality, right? After all that, I ask myself, why is everything the same as before?

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Júlia Serra