What’s the first thing that you do when you wake up in the morning? If you’re like me, you grab the glass from the night stand and gulp about 8 ounces. It’s how you start your day right, you know? Or maybe you brush your teeth first. Or make a smoothie. Or wash your face. Or flush the toilet. Whatever you do, I bet that your first few minutes involve water.
And so do most of the minutes that make up our days.
From standing around the cooler talking football during a break at work to cleaning vegetables before dinner, and from washing your hands after using the bathroom to doing your laundry so that you don’t wear the same shirt 3x in one week (okay, some of us still do that anyways), water is an integral part of our day.
Luckily, it’s really easy to come by.
Well, for most of us.
I was in Zambia in 2014, and if i’m honest, my hygiene suffered greatly. Why? Because of the difficulty in attaining clean water. In order to wash dishes, take a bath, brush our teeth, or anything of the like, we had to walk into the corn field with 5 gallon buckets, lower them into the well, and walk them inside to the 50 gallon drum from whence we got the water necessary for the above activities. There’s nothing like getting clean and then realizing that you have to go and fetch water for the next day, effectively nullifying the cold bucket shower that you forced yourself to take. It was fun at first, but there was a point 2 weeks in when I was standing in a bathtub that I barely fit in and nearly depressed because I was tired of having to work so hard just to take a bath. Sounds a bit dramatic, and it probably was, but it was my reality at the time. Because i’m used to having water whenever I want it.
What i’ve discovered in my travels, and even since, is that my Zambian family, whom most of us feel sorry for because of their lack of running water, is actually considered fortunate in a lot of their region. Because they actually HAVE water.
But many aren’t so fortunate.
Did you know that 663 million people in the world live without clean water?
That diseases from dirty water result in more deaths a year than all forms of violence, including war? 43% of those deaths being children under 5?
That in Africa alone, women spend nearly 40 billion hours a year walking for water?
That’s 40 billion hours when they aren’t in school. When they aren’t tending the crops. When they aren’t running businesses that feed their families.
Lest you think this is a guilt trip, here’s the good news:
We can do something about it.
An organization that i’ve come to love and respect, charity: water, is literally changing the world through it’s clean water initiatives. They work with local experts and community members to find the best sustainable solution to provide long term access to clean water for the community.
Through their efforts, whole communities are changing. Clean water and healthy sanitation ensures that teenage women don’t have to miss school for a week out of the month to protect their health. It ensures that young boys don’t have to spend hours walking to the nearest stream, hours that they should be in class learning. It gives a community it’s crops back. It allows rural clinics to operate with clean supplies and surgical tools (something that, believe it or not, is not always a given). It gives villagers their time back so that they can run the businesses that feed their families.
In short, clean water can change everything.
Since 2006, charity: water has made it possible for over 7 million people in 25 countries to have access to clean water for the first time. And they aren’t stopping there. Their goal is to work themselves out of existence as an organization in our lifetime. Because they are going to make sure that everyone gets clean water. Everyone. In the whole world.
Even better, in an age where well known charities have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative fees and unnecessary expenses, charity: water has pledged that 100% of every dollar raised through the public goes straight to what it was intended for: providing clean water. They can do this because they have a separate portfolio of private donors that fund all of their administrative expenses. Want transparency? They’ll prove to you where your dollar goes by sending GPS coordinates and pictures of the project that your money funded. I love it.
Why am I talking up charity: water so much?
Because this year i’m giving them my birthday.
Instead of gifts or well wishes on my Facebook timeline, i’m asking that you’ll join my campaign in providing clean water for people around the world. The goal I was given is $350, which will provide water for approximately 11 people. But I know my people, and I know that you are some of the most generous i’ve ever met. You’ve sent me around the world (literally) in the past 5 years. I think we can do more. So i’m upping the ante to $1,000 for clean water. Are you in?
What do we get out of this? Not much. We will probably never meet the people that received water because of this campaign, and there won’t be any coupons in the mail. Probably no one will even know that you gave. But we do get to be the people that we were made to be: world changers. I recently confessed in a blog that I was the problem in the world, and many of you agreed. I say we change that.
To give the gift of clean water, click the link below:
https://my.charitywater.org/andrew-chambers-2/birthday-water
Much love,
Andrew
