When Water Hurts

8-year-old Mervis doesn’t remember the last time water felt like a blessing. These days, it feels more like something she has to survive.

It was a quiet afternoon when Mervis and her sister, 13-year-old Donata, went to collect water from the well in their Malawi village. No one else was around. The ground was slippery from all the spilled water, and the slope was steep.

Then, it happened.

Mervis slipped and fell straight into the water pit.

Her leg twisted. She couldn’t climb out. She was stuck.

“When I saw her, I shouted. I screamed so that people should come and help me. When I screamed some boys came and helped me to get her out of the well,” Donata remembers. 

It took three hours before help came. The boys finally pulled Mervis out, but her leg was badly hurt.

“When I fell into the water, my heart was beating a lot. I injured my leg. My leg was paining me,” Mervis says.

Even now, a month later, Mervis is still afraid to go to the well alone. She only dares to get water if others are there. If not, she asks someone else to go in her place.

But the family needs 12 buckets of water a day - about 240 litres - for everything: cooking, cleaning, drinking, bathing, watering their small garden. If the girls don’t help, their mother, Magdalena, has to go eight times a day.

Each trip takes about an hour.

And the road is not easy.

“Near where we collect water, there is a steepness that makes it hard to climb with a bucket of water on our head,” says Magdalena.

The physical toll is deep. Each bucket weighs 20 litres. For a child, that’s heavier than a schoolbag filled with books.

“I can’t twist my neck. When I put the bucket down, I feel like there’s still something on my head. When I carry a 20-litre bucket of water, I feel really bad. My head hurts. That pains me a lot. My head feels like it’s crushing," Mervis says.

Donata carries the same weight. But it’s not just the pain she fears.

“I’m most afraid of stepping on a stone or brick. Being pierced by thorns. Also afraid of being bitten by a snake," says Donata. 

For the girls, water hurts - their heads, their bodies, their health.

And it hurts their future too.

To get to school on time, they have to fetch water from 5 am to 7 am. Even so, they sometimes arrive late and are sent home. Donata missed so much school, she had to repeat Grade 3.

“I feel pain in my heart because the challenge of water made my children be late for classes,” Magdalena says.

The water doesn’t just hurt them on the outside.

It hurts them from the inside too.

The water is dirty - cloudy with mud and germs. But the family has no choice.

“When I get the water and put it in the bucket, it looks very dirty like there’s dirty soil. But when I drink it, it tastes sweet. But it makes my stomach feel pain. When I drink that water, the pain is as if my intestines are moving and I start diarrhoea,” says Mervis.

The girls often fall sick with stomach pain and diarrhoea. They miss more school, and their little bodies grow weak.

Dirty water can also cause trachoma - a painful eye disease. Mervis’s little sister, Lidia, got it when she was just two. Her parents had to pedal a pushbike for two hours to get her to the hospital, and wait another five hours just for treatment.

Still, after all the walking, carrying, hurting, and falling sick, the water is not always enough.

There are days when there isn’t even enough to wash their clothes.

“My children always tell me, ‘Mom, when we went to school our friends are laughing at us because our clothes are dirty. We do not feel comfortable'. That causes a pain in my heart," says Magdalena.

But through it all, Magdalena and her husband, Amidu, stand together. They’ve been married 26 years. When he’s home, he guards their crops at night, sleeping near the field so nothing is stolen.

If Magdalena had clean water nearby, she could use that time to grow more food for her children. With the extra harvest, she could sell what they don’t eat. They could fix their house. Maybe even afford a roof that keeps out the rain.

Mervis dreams of something bigger than her village, bigger than the clouds she sees above.

She wants to fly.

“I want to be a pilot,” she says brightly.

And she knows what she needs to take flight.

“Having clean water helps one not to get sick. This will help me to achieve my goals. Having water close by would help me to have enough time to study,” she says. 

For now, water is the thing that takes most from their day, from their bodies - from their childhood.

But clean water doesn’t just quench thirst - it gives back time, it brings back strength, it restores dignity.

It lets children like Mervis grow, learn, and dream without fear, without pain.

Because when water hurts, every part of childhood is lost.

But when water heals - everything begins to change.

Find out more about our work to:

Provide Clean Water & Sanitation to children around the world - wherever they call home.

Give children clean water through Child Sponsorship

It’s More Than Water. It’s Life.