I’m working on another column of my own, but I wanted to share a piece of powerful work from a colleague in the meanwhile.

Brezhnev Malaba is a journalist in Zimbabwe, and like me, a member of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism. He wrote this investigative story, which also has wonderful photography from Zinyange Auntony and Darlington Mwashita.

The story focuses on an entire city facing water shortages, and resonates with the stories I’ve written about Cole’s Creek, and the stories about Flint, Michigan, too. The people of Bulawayo have been dealing with water shortage and safety issues in the midst of a pandemic. Diarrhea has gotten so bad that for a time it had killed more people than COVID-19. Women and girls travel in groups to seek water for fear of being assaulted and raped.

I think it displays not only the importance of water and the difficulty of people in countries not as wealthy as our own, but also the extreme importance of maintaining good infrastructure and keeping government accountable to that.

I encourage you to at least browse through and see the photos and read some of the pull-quotes. There’s also a podcast with Brezhnev in the Waterless series, the same season I was priveleged to be a part of. I found him to be inspiring.