The Sanctity of Water

In the last post, I gave a couple ways that we use water everyday of our life. It's surprising how much we depend on it, if you think about it. In the United States, and in most other developed countries, water simply flows when you turn the handle on your sink or turn on your shower. Do we take for granted the fact that we have an instantly accessible supply of clean water for pennies on the dollar? Yes.

Lets look at things from a different perspective.. In undeveloped and underprivileged places like Africa and parts of the middle east, drinking water is miles from your village or town. More often than not, the closest resource is a river that has been polluted so badly that drinking the water may kill you. AND IT DOES. 42,000 deaths each week occur from water related disease; that is more than all war and violence kills. Lets take a sample of what is actually in this water: E.coli, Salmonella typhi, Schistosoma, Cholera vibrios, and Hepatitis A. That is some dirty water. But it is all that some families have to rely upon.

The point of this article isn't meant to make you feel guilty about living in a privileged world, but rather to convey some perspective about how some people aren't living with even the bare essentials.

 Stated in a claim by the website http://www.charitywater.org/whywater/,  "By 2050, the world's population is estimated to grow by three billion and 90% of this growth will be in the developing world." How are these countries supposed to support this kind of population explosion if they can't support themselves adequately now? 


As an environmental advocate, I believe that we should do all we can to make sure these people have access to a sustainable, convenient, maintainable, inexpensive, and safe source of drinking water. The website above does a lot of work in drilling water wells in remote villages of Africa. Donating to them will ensure that people get the clean water that we should all be entitled to.


These villages are able to get water from outside companies, but it is extremely overpriced and unrealistic. More on this in future posts.