Giving Tuesday

With Black Friday, Small Business, and Cyber Monday, it's easy to forget that the real joy of the season is found in the giving! Kick of the holiday season today by making a donation to Wells Bring Hope on this first national day of giving.


                  

Strive for Noble Causes

  

{Photo by Gil Garcetti}

Water: Here and There

by Kristin Allen

Out of curiosity the other day, I asked a number of people to describe their basic life needs.  I got a variety of answers:  food, housing, the internet, their cell phone, HBO, and a daily Starbucks non-fat/half-caf/soy caramel latte.  Not a single person mentioned “water.”  To most of us, water is a “given.”

To be fair, before I became involved with Wells Bring Hope, I didn’t understand or appreciate how desperate the situation was, and how many people were living without clean, safe drinking water.  You turned on the tap and water came out.  Right? 

Water is so abundant to us, that the water in the tap is frequently not even good enough.  We want water that has added vitamins, or electrolytes, or comes from a special tropical island.  In fact, I just came across one company selling bottled water (at $21 dollars for a case of 12 bottles!) designed to “stimulate your soul” by being “infused with Universal Energy.”  Wow.

Water is almost a gimmick in the United States.  However, in Niger, water is literally life……and frequently means death.  68% of Niger’s rural population has no access to clean, safe water.

I traveled to Niger in January 2012 with Wells Bring Hope.    We visited a village without clean, safe water.  We traveled to their local water source, which was a grimy, muddy hole where women and children stood for hours in line to pull up a bucket of polluted, filthy water for their families….if they were lucky.  

Many stood for hours, only to learn that the water had dried up and they had to go home empty handed.   The villagers knew that the water they were feeding their babies and children was dangerous, even deadly.   1 in 7 infants and children in Niger die before the age of 5 as a result of contaminated water.  Many women we spoke with had lost a child, or multiple children, to water-related diseases…..that was their fate, they believed.

I often speak passionately to individuals and groups about the needs of the people of Niger, and I have been asked “Why do they stay if there is no water?”  It seems like such an innocent question, but there is nothing more complex.  It is like asking someone who lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood riddled with gang violence, why don’t they move, as if it were that simple.  But where would they go?  It takes resources to move.  It takes a place to move to – room for an entire village.   Unfortunately, not only is moving NOT an option, but Niger is being inundated with refugees from neighboring Mali  who are fleeing from the violence of Al Qaeda.  This is putting a strain on the already incredibly limited resources of the world’s second poorest country.

The only way to really address the problem is to help get clean, safe water to the villages through the drilling of borehole wells.  I saw it happen.  It was absolutely thrilling to watch the reactions of the people when a well drilled to 250-300 feet into the ground yielded life-saving water. 

The village literally exploded with excitement.   The people knew that it meant life, and the start of truly being able to live.   They danced and reveled in the water as it shot up from the ground and rained down on them like liquid gold.  I couldn’t help but join them in their dance of joy.  I knew that my life had changed too, and that I would never, ever look at the water that flowed out of my tap in the same way again. 

The Cost of Unsafe Water

{image source: naosuke li}