In the townships, where families sleep in shifts for lack of beds and draw their water from a communal tap, unemployment runs about 40 percent.

Just a speed bump separates this suburb from a black peasant reserve where the women carry water jugs home to mud huts from communal taps.

He pointed at the new reservoir supplying communal taps that used to run dry.

I remember that we didn't have a tap in the house but used a communal tap from which we had to fill two barrels in our garden.

Every morning before we went to school, we all had to take a bucket appropriate to our size and run a relay from the communal tap to the barrels until they were full.

While her smallest children scrounge about for firewood, older children fetch water for bathing and cooking from a communal tap.

There, women draped in layers of dark clothing draw water from communal taps.

In Oukasie, there are 54 communal taps for an estimated 10,000 people, and the sewerage is taken away in buckets.

Did they have to hear other people's whispering that they were traitors to their country every time they went to the communal tap for water?

The drinking water that flows to the few communal taps comes from a reservoir polluted by two cemeteries that lie submerged in the rainy season.