WaterAid's local partner, DSK, already provides the only source of clean drinking water to the village. The city water authorities refused to supply clean water here, because the slum-dwellers do not have the legal right of tenancy to the land. So DSK stepped in as guarantor.But the people can afford to use the clean water only for drinking. If some one lends us the money to get out of this situation, we will repay him."She earns just £3.50 a month working as a cleaner. "People are living there and bringing up their children properly We have the right to do the same but look at this slum We don't want anything free We are hard-working people. And this is where Fatima and the other women have to wash the old rags they use as makeshift sanitary towels during their periods.

There are no disposable sanitary towels in Bangladesh; they hang the rags up to dry and reuse them."Look at those buildings," Fatima says, pointing at the apartment blocks. This is the sewage outlet for the middle-class apartments opposite. The slum ends abruptly at a fetid lake of foul-smelling water. That is our only hope."The women who are married can rely on their husbands for protection, but half of the women here are single mothers A few, like Fatima, are widows. Most have been abandoned by runaway husbands.To most in the West, it may seem surprising that a charity whose focus is providing water is needed in Bangladesh, a country that suffered its worst floods in decades this summer.

That is where WaterAid comes in.The slum where Fatima lives is a wretched place, desperately narrow alleys between the corrugated metal walls of the shanty houses, the ground a mass of mud and human faeces. What these people need is clean, safe drinking water, and basic sanitation. Much of the country was under water, including the slum where Fatima lives.But WaterAid does not only provide drought relief. The flood water, which spreads disease, is an enemy of the slum-dwellers. "If one of us is attacked, the other woman will call for help," Fatima says "Perhaps some one will hear and come to help. "Sometimes the queues are so long some of the women cannot hold it in, and go in their clothes while they're waiting in the queue." If they have to come at night, the women take another woman with them for protection There is no electric light, and it is pitch dark.

"We all suffer pains from trying to avoid going," Fatima says. He told a news conference in Ramallah that the election process was "at serious risk of interference", including from "external parties" who appeared to be making an assumption that "a certain candidate will win".While Israeli politicians have been careful not to state their preferences, they and international politicians, ranging from Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, to Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, have made little secret of their hopes that Mr Abbas will win.Mustafa Barghouti refused to say whether he also had in mind suggestions that a conference in London planned by Tony Blair mainly for Palestinian leaders might not go ahead if Marwan Barghouti won the election, scheduled for 9 January. This is what they call a hanging latrine.Most of the women try to come in the middle of the day, for a short space of time when the men are at work. And that is not because the lavatory is a couple of planks of wood over an open stream that carries the sewage through the heart of the slum where she lives. The small growth in the third quarter prevented the economy from contracting for the second straight quarter - a technical definition of recession.Heizo Takenaka, the economics minister, insisted that the economy was still on track for growth and had simply entered a period of consolidation. They are flimsy affairs, just four bamboo screens that do not even reach the ground to provide a little privacy, hanging out over the open sewer.

Women run the risk of rape after dark. The slum is in the heart of Dhaka, a city of more than 10 million people where the desperately poor are overlooked by the tower apartment blocks of the middle classes. But here, among the warrens of the slum, even the most basic necessities of life are a gruelling ordeal.The two latrines Fatima uses are shared by 25 families. By day, when the men are here, the women of this slum in Bangladesh's capital are too ashamed to use the latrine in front of them And by night, men from outside the slum hang around. The immediate fallout for Japan is becoming all too evident - a stronger yen and possible recession in 2005."The reaction from financial markets was mixed. For Fatima Begum, going to the lavatory is a nightmare. The Nikkei closed up 0.62 at 10,941.37 after some investors said the GDP figures were better than expected, but most government bond prices rose as the figures backed the market's view that the recovery had passed its peak.. He said: "Government officials may choose to blame US profligacy for the trade imbalances [but] the real reason for the emergence of such chronic imbalances has been the impact of corporate restructuring on consumer demand.