Work never done
Women struggled with water woes after Maria
SAN JUAN — When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico nearly a year ago, it took away many households’ reliable access to clean water — a resource so vital that progress for women, achieved over decades, was effectively undone.
The burden of housekeeping fell mostly on mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and grandmothers, who said some tasks were nearly impossible without water and power, according to an Oxfam report released Monday.
The study, called “The Weight of Water,” sheds light on the outsized impact the hurricane had on women as a result of gender roles within and outside of the home.
“Women were usually the ones who spent hours wringing sodden towels by hand and hanging them to dry, carrying containers of water into the kitchen, bathing children in buckets, washing floors with rainwater collected in cans. It was exhausting, and demoralizing,” the study said.
While men helped find and collect water, and perform other tasks that required vehicles and upper body strength, women’s work was typically more physically demanding and time-consuming.
“There are pretty established gender roles in the communities we visited, and it’s very common for women to take the lead on domestic tasks like cleaning, doing laundry and cooking, which all happen to be very water-intensive,” said Pam Silva, Oxfam’s former lead public health technician and one of the study’s researchers.
“When there’s no piped water these tasks become manual labor, but that doesn’t mean the gender roles change,” she said.
“I almost cried every time I had to do it,” one woman said of the struggle to procure water for her household every day.
Elizabeth Pagan, 55, spent seven months without water after the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irma and Maria knocked out her supply.
“We didn’t have water to begin with by the time Hurricane Maria hit,” she told the Daily News.
Pagan, a retired school teacher, lives on a hard-to-access road in Comerio, located in the center-eastern part of the island. “We’re very high up, so even when there’s water in the tank, the pressure is pretty low,” she said.
In the months following the hurricanes, Pagan, who is single, made daily trips to a nearby town that had given Comerio residents access to a well with certified clean drinking water. She was responsible for her household, which she shares with her sister, nieces and autistic nephew.
“I brought whatever I could find — empty bottles, anything — to collect water with,” she said.
While water collection was grueling — the real work began when they returned home. Without the assistance of technology, distributing water around the house to perform necessary chores took longer than usual, causing fatigue and injury.
“Women did a lot of work before, but the hurricane changed everything. It took much more time to prepare meals, so we ate about two hours later than usual,” Pagan said.
“Not a thing was easy,” said 67-year-old Olga Labrador Maldonado, also a resident of Comerio, who endured four months without water and seven and a half months without power, according to the study.
Women devised inventive solutions to alleviate their workloads.
Millie Reyes, who lives on a hillside, devised a makeshift shower by attaching a spigot to an empty detergent container, according to the Oxfam report.
“That way they didn’t have to take a bowl and bend over and throw water over themselves,” Silva said.
Pagan remains upbeat after the hurricane. She recalls neighbors bickering while waiting on line for water.
“I would say that it’s not the end of the world, we live in the Caribbean, and this is what nature did to us, but it’s part of life here. We have strong moments, and others that are less strong,” she said.