The plan is to ditch the morning coffee, skip the lunchtime soda and do away with the nighttime beverage and instead drink water for 40 days. Save the money I would normally spend on drinks and give it away torwards the building and restoring of wells, building filtering systems and education. Come join me for 40 days of water.
I know I have been concentrating most of my efforts to the cause of the clean water crisis in Africa but I became curious about the rest of the World, in particular my World, the U.S.A. Are we immune to water issues? We would like to think so but Oh Contrair! Some sources expect that 36 States will have water shortages by 2013 and already, the seven states, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California that share water from the Colorado river have begun negotiations on how to manage the river's limited and dwindling flow.
This is my cat Tucker... We have a love/hate relationship but my daughter Ella says mostly love no matter what I say. He is like a two year old child, really... and I guess my husband and I have fed into that. He does not like water from his bowl but begs for water from the tub. He begs for allot of other goodies which he often also gets but to save him from any embarrassment I did not picture his rotund little body! Sometimes we forget to turn off the tub water stream and find that it may have been running freely for hours at a time. By the way..... I know I have the ugliest bathtub you have ever seen.
Allot of our rainwater here in the US falls to the ever growing concrete slabs and picks up bacteria, pollutants and chemical along the way. It's not being absorbed into the ground but runs off into our water systems, streams, rivers and lakes. A large portion of our water treatment facilities were built decades ago and were not designed to handle the volume of all the runoff and impurities we are now putting in our water. For instance all the pharmaceuticals and pesticide's that are constantly being dumped into our drainage systems are some of the items that our treatment facilities have a hard time filtering out. In some areas raw sewage and illegal dumping are contaminating streams, rivers and lakes.
In our land of plenty I think we just don't think about it and take for granted God's blessings because water has always been plentiful for us. You can bet your bootie that if my family were living in Uganda today, We would not even consider running tub water for our cat.... no matter how precious. Just something to think about....
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Day Eleven:
The calendar says that I am a quarter of the way through the 40 day challenge and I have to say that it's true what they say about being able to think more deeply about things when you are deprived of something you are used to having.
Today I have been thinking about an aspect of water that doesn't involve being thirsty. It is the problem of sanitation. Another byproblem of having a lack of accesible clean water.
I am sure most of you have and I know I have experienced times when the power went out, sometimes for a few days at a time due to bad weather or a main power line beeing downed. How inconvenient when their is no electricity to pump water up to our faucets or toilets. I don't know about you, but at that time water and sanitation becomes a big part of my thought process. This week I have been thinking about what it would be like to be in that situation permanently. From the time we are in preschool here in the Western world, we are taught hygiene. Everyone has sung the "Twinkle Twinkle little star" song while washing hands and the proper technique on how to do. We take for granted that the rest of the world has been taught the same thing. What I have learned is that a lot of programs involved in the clean water campaigns are spending time, energy and money teaching water hygiene techniques to not only children but adults as well. Amazing... I had no idea!
The "tippy tap" is a low cost, low tech, low water, hands-free device to promote hand washing with soap.
It baffles me to think that thousands of children die all over the world not only because they have no access to clean water, but the water that they do have available to them is so far away, scarse and not very potable. They skip sanitation practices because either it takes too much energy or due to ignorance and they end up getting sick or dying from diahrea, dehydration caused by gineaworm, disentary, cholera, trachoma which are all water born diseases. All this is so preventable with education and simple water saving techniques.
