Carting water in Monrovia. Picture from here.
Myles Estey, a journalist based in Liberia, has a series on his blog called Gettin’ By. He uses the series to counter the oft-repeated stat that 85% of Liberians don’t have jobs. Each part of the series explains how a job in the microeconomy works.
This week’s entry explains the business of pushing jerries of water through Monrovia. Here’s an excerpt:
Each cart–as pictured above–can fit up to 40 jugs (or ‘jerries’) of water. Each jerry holds a little less than 20 L of water. That is a lot of weight (looking at the numbers, this seems impossible: that’s roughly 1600 pounds) but I often count the jerries in the cart of the dude bringing water to my house, and when you fill the jerries, they are 5 US gallons, which is just under 20 L).To fill these at the fill stations, carriers are charged ‘2 fa 5′: $5 LD (7 US cents) buys you two jerries. I believe it is also possible to get free water from community pumps, but it’s uncommon because a) its largely discouraged to take so much water at community pumps and b) its very time consuming.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.