On a blazing hot summer day, rumours that the water truck is finally arriving spread like wildfire through the village of Ezbit al-Taweel. In minutes, some 100 men, women and children pour onto the town’s main road, each with as many containers as they can carry.

Trying to escape the punishing sun, Osama Sayed and his seven-year-old son, Ahmed, take shelter beneath a bush. “It’s like we’ve travelled back in time, having to wait with jars for the water carrier,” says Sayed. Severe water cuts have repeatedly forced him and the 5,000 other farmers living in this small Nile Delta village to wait hours, sometimes even days, for drinking water, amid a severe heatwave in the Middle East.

Read more of The Guardian‘s story here: ‘We woke up in a desert’ – the water crisis taking hold across Egypt