The Price of Clean Water
It’s never too early to begin teaching your children about the needs of others around the world. Recently, as I was burning some limbs with my seven-year-old son by my side, he commented on how hard the work was. A teachable moment! As we worked, I told him about a group of people I had met along the way. A beautiful, hard working people. The people of Northern Kenya.
For these people, the hard work of searching for firewood was a daily battle. Living in desert conditions in an area covered in what has the appearance of lava rock, they had to search for enough wood to cook every meal, every day. That is why it was an awesome privilege to squat around a small fire in a rounded stick hut, while a Rendille woman boiled some camel’s milk to make us chai tea. Everything about that experience, including the burning sticks, screamed “sacrifice.”
But, for the people of Northern Kenya, the battle for fire was also a battle for health. Fire was one of the methods of purifying the water that was ever so scarce in their land. Typically it was drawn from a basin, a pond – probably one where goats waded nearby as women and children used whatever means they could to contain and transport the water. This water was full of illness causing microbes, of whose dangers the people were just beginning to understand.
With limited purification methods, boiling their water could have been a viable solution, but searching twice as hard to find twice as much firewood so they could not only cook a meal, but also boil their water was just not realistic.
To some, these are “theoretical problems” of faceless strangers in an unknown land. To me, they are very real problems faced by friends in a land just as valuable as ours. This is where GCI comes in. Through a comprehensive plan designed to not only teach the people about the need for clean water, but also to provide sustainable, realistic solutions to obtaining clean water, GCI will provide life-giving relief to communities who would otherwise have to continually watch their children suffer from completely preventable diseases. Will you join us in the fight?
