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![\"Caution\"](\"http:\/\/bluelivingidea.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/Caution.jpg\")
Sanaa, Yemen’s capital is filling up already with desperate people escaping regional water shortages in the surrounding countryside. It has only ten years before the city wells run completely dry.<\/p>\n
In the North, women and children now climb a 4,500 foot mountain before dawn to be at the front of the queue to get water from a spring, and although virtually every house has a rainwater tank, the scarcity is everywhere. In some cities, water now comes out of taps only about once a month.<\/p>\n
Groundwater reserves are being used faster than they can replenish themselves. People dig unlicensed and illegal wells to try and tap the last drops of a depleted aquifer that has sunk dramatically from 60 feet down to now 600 feet down. Yemen has been water-poor for thousands of years, but has never had scarcity at this level.<\/p>\n
And in a horrifying example of how crazy people might become in this situation; a terrible choice has been made to funnel almost half of the water there is to growing a stimulant drug that almost three quarters of Yemeni men chew constantly – no doubt partly to mitigate the existential crisis the whole society faces.<\/p>\n
In some parts of Yemen, the Gat tree that supplies the Gat leaves that the men chew compulsively is the only green thing seen growing there now.<\/p>\n
Gat makes you not feel thirst. But desperation and stimulant drugs make guns seem like the solution.<\/p>\n