There were so many moments this morning when I wanted to crawl back into my warm, warm bed, but I’m so glad I stumbled out into the cold to complete my church’s water hike. About fifteen of us met this morning to trek buckets down to a creek and back – a three mile journey in total – to simulate the chore that millions of women and children in the developing world have to perform every day for our most basic resource.
Here’s a video from Charity:Water that basically illustrates what we were trying to experience today (sans Jennifer Connelly):
Our journey took about two hours as grown adults, so I can’t imagine how it must be for the children tasked with retrieving water for their families. Plus, my weak little self could only handle filling my bucket halfway without sloshing everywhere. I would barely have covered my own water needs, let alone a household’s. After the jump, I’ve included photos from our hike so you can see what our water actually looked like at the end.
(For the record, I chickened out of wearing my Tom’s shoes. With the brisk cold and the soggy ground, I relented that the canvas slip-ons were probably not the wisest choice. We had to scramble through a lot of woods and down hills, so I probably would have lost my balance and my bucket if I’d worn them.)
Our guide Jeromy spent a year in Kenya while adopting his two children and was stunned by the effort needed to provide water when it wasn’t free-flowing from our taps. Families spend hours each day retrieving and hauling enough water to facilitate all the washing, cooking, and drinking necessary to survive. Since his return to the US, Jeromy has been passionate about raising awareness of water issues across the world. He provided us these startling facts:
- Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is readily accessible for direct human use
- One billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
- Over 3.5 million people die each year from a water-related disease.
- An American taking a 5-minute shower uses more water than the typical person living in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.
These statistics only begin to show the picture and don’t even touch the bacteria and diseases that infect the poor-quality water on which most of the world relies. Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” So take the tragedy of one child’s death and multiply it by 3.5 million per year, just from water alone, to get a better picture.
It’s hard to hear things like this and then try to materialize how to help. I can’t take a shorter shower or flush less in order to provide more clean water for Kenya; it doesn’t work like that. We should obviously conserve water anyway, but the only way to really make any real impact in the struggle for water is to raise awareness and provide funding for wells and water purification projects. Jeromy said that if more communities have access to water, they can spend the time it had taken to cover that basic need and apply it to improving their communities and addressing other issues. I had never considered how addressing the water issue could have that kind of societal effect.
I’m definitely glad I went on this hike and think other people should attempt something similar, just to get a glimpse of what the majority of the world has to endure for a drink. I know our walk was in no way akin to the actual chore, but it was hopefully a fair representation.
In the last four hours since I’ve been back in my apartment, I’ve flushed the toilet twice, washed my hands three times, and made a pot of coffee – far more water used than what I carried in two hours this morning. Definitely makes me pause for thought. I’m excited to learn more about these water issues and how they have affected developing communities.
For more information, check out these sites:
- Charity:Water (Twitter: @charitywater)
- Blood Water Mission (Twitter: @bloodwater)
- Water.org (Twitter: @water)
- Lifewater.org (Twitter: @lifewater)
- A great Twitter list by QuestionsForLife: @QFL/water
