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For half an hour every Tuesday, if she’s lucky, Adriana Ramírez saves the water that she, her husband and their four children use for a week. The ideal is to achieve a stockpile of at least six 55 gallon drums. “Everyone should have their tank and garbage can at home to fill up as soon as possible,” says the woman urgently. Not a drop must be wasted. “We bathe with this,” says Ramírez, pointing to a bucket with about three liters of water that’s on the floor of a bathroom with no shower or sink. According to complaints from neighborhood community action boards, another 20,000 families like yours live without aqueduct service in more than 10 illegal settlements in the southern Bogotá city of Ciudad Bolívar. Their access to water, like their presence on the territory, goes beyond the norm and is justified by necessity.
View of the city of Ciudad Bolivar. Diego Cuevas
The water supply of the Verbenal del Sur neighborhood is managed by the municipality and works through informal connections linked to a neighboring area. “This water comes from the Bella Flor neighborhood,” explains the 38-year-old mother. There, a plumber unblocks the flow of the pipes so that the liquid reaches each house once a week through several motor pumps that the neighbors have funded and distributed in different parts of the neighborhood. The plumber’s payment is 3,000 Colombian pesos (70 cents) per apartment.
Astrid Suesca, another resident of the sector, collects about 2,000 liters for her family every Thursday, but nothing guarantees that she will have the same luck every week. “A month ago we had no water because the aqueduct reduced the pressure in the pipes,” says the housewife. On such occasions, she has to walk 40 minutes with five people’s laundry on her back to wash at a friend’s house in another neighborhood. “In my family, we had to drink rainwater,” says Ramírez.
Both women have lived in Verbenal del Sur for more than a decade and continue to await the legalization of the sector to ensure supplies. “We don’t want to steal our water. If we had the service, I know we would do whatever it takes to pay for it,” says Suesca. Both she and Ramírez barely earn a minimum monthly salary of one million pesos (just over $220) to support the entire family’s needs.
The lack of water means an unaffordable expense for the residents of the neighborhood. “If the water doesn’t come, I have to buy at least five six-liter bags, which is 15,000 pesos (just over $3) a day,” says Suesca. “I’m surprised to see how there are people who leave the faucet open the whole time they shower, brush their teeth or wash the dishes,” he says with a frustrated grin.
A resident of the Verbenal Sur neighborhood goes in search of water. Diego Cuevas
“In Verbenal alone, water shortages affect 9,000 families,” said Daimer Quinero, president of the neighborhood’s Community Action Board, who has worked with other neighborhood leaders to promote ministry in the area. In late August, residents of a dozen neighborhoods in Ciudad Bolívar demonstrated against the issue. The company providing the service does little more than say that the settlements are not formal. “We don’t have the legal authority to be present in these areas,” explains Fabián Santa, Customer Service Manager for the Bogotá Aqueduct.
Community leaders and local government have met with public company officials to finalize agreements on the use of illegal pipe networks. “We’re trying to organize informality and exercise technical control over the connections,” Santa says, noting that the aqueduct doesn’t have enough infrastructure for everyone to have access to water the way they do. “They use the direct drive train and the water flow rate decreases; which affects the distribution of the service even in legalized neighborhoods,” he affirms. According to him, despite living in a formalized neighborhood, the residents of Bella Flor had problems due to lack of water. According to the organization, coverage in Bogotá is 99%, making Verbenal del Sur residents 1% of the victims.
For the Ramírez and Suesca households, legalization is a matter of speculation. “There are about nine neighborhoods that could be subject to formalization in the future [entre los que se encuentra Verbenal del Sur]“, says the mayor of Ciudad Bolívar, Tatiana Piñeros. But there is no clear perspective as to when these homes might be legitimate for the state. “We hope that with the enabling of the Territorial Ordering Plan (POT), new possibilities will open up,” he says. The official is referring to an urban planning tool that was used in the capital until a few weeks ago and is used to organize and control land use in Colombia’s communities and cities.
A bucket filled with water in the Verbenal Sur neighborhood. Diego Cuevas
According to the city’s mayor’s office, as of last year there were more than a hundred illegal settlements whose files were awaiting legalization at the district planning secretariat.
Despite the expectations, not everyone in the neighborhood can hold out hope that the relevant government secretariats will legalize their homes. “Verbenal del Sur is in the process of legalization, but there is an area in the neighborhood that shouldn’t be legalized,” Quintero says of an occupied country that’s in a landslide-prone area. “It’s an invasion where about 1,500 families live together,” warns the community leader.
Among those secret homes is that of Isleni Pérez, a single mother of five who came to the neighborhood after the pandemic. “I lost my job as a seamstress in a factory and one of my brothers helped me get here,” says the 40-year-old woman from San Jose del Guaviare, who was violently displaced 15 years ago.
His house, which started with loom walls and is now made of cans and metal tiles, has not and will not have any basic legal services as it stands in the middle of a ravine that could collapse if nature decides. “I just want a decent apartment,” says Pérez, who lives with three of his children on less than half the minimum wage a month. His house has gas through a dropper that recharges once a month. The light depends on the derivation of a neighboring cable and the water, which arrives a few hours a day with little pressure, comes from the informal connection that Mrs. María has in the house next door. Isleni pays María 25,000 pesos (just over $5.5) a month for water and another 25,000 to her neighbor Fabián for electricity. She has been in arrears with her payment to Fabián for weeks and has been groping in the dark for eight days amid the grievances of her 12-year-old son Wiston, who has a brain condition.
Isleni Pérez in front of his home in Ciudad Bolívar Diego Cuevas
“I want to set up my own sewing workshop,” says the woman as she shows how to manually fill the broken washing machine that’s propped on the floor next to an empty refrigerator. In the bathroom there are several buckets to flush the toilet tank and shower. “I dream of a decent life for her,” the mother continues, staring at Xiomara, her nine-year-old daughter, who hides her eyes behind the sheet metal that serves as the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. Pérez wants to show how the dishwasher works, but not a single drop of water is coming out of the tap at the moment. Like Ramírez and Suesca, the woman has no choice but to wait.
General view of Ciudad Bolivar. Diego Cuevas