Access to Clean Water is a Life Changing Experience
Access to Clean Water is a Life Changing Experience
Access to clean water is a life changing experience. 30,000 people die every year because they don’t have access to clean water. Now imagine if those people hadn’t died there would be over 780 million people who don’t have access to clean water, that is more than 2 ½ times the population of the US. Every single person in these conditions has to make a decision that ends in death. They have the choice of drinking the dirty water and becoming sick or dehydrating and becoming sick. And most of these people are children. By the time you have finished reading this sentence one child would have died as one dies every 20 seconds due to water related issues.
Sanitation is one reason people don’t have access to clean water. Sanitation generally refers to the act of providing safe facilities for the distribution of human waste. The distribution of sewage should not be placed into a water supply. More people own a mobile phone than a toilet; 8 million people do not have access to a toilet. This is such a massive problem that Water Aid dedicated November 19 to be world toilet day, where they draw attention to 1 in 3 women worldwide that don’t have anywhere safe to go to the toilet.
Is a person’s way of life lowered by not having access to clean water? In Africa alone women and children spend 40 billion hours collecting water. This question has an answer in Tanzania where an 18-year-old girl called Rachel Anton lives. Rachel is from the Inonelwa village. She collects water from a puddle at the bottom of a pit, which she has to wait 3 hours in the boiling hot sun for, even though it is not clean. In the dry season she could wait from 5am to 11pm, as there is not much water in the hole it is harder to get. She hoes to fill 4 buckets a day, which she will use for cooking, cleaning, etc.
At only 14 Rachel is already married and has a son to care for. With reliable clean water
Access to clean water is a life changing experience. 30,000 people die every year because they don’t have access to clean water. Now imagine if those people hadn’t died there would be over 780 million people who don’t have access to clean water, that is more than 2 ½ times the population of the US. Every single person in these conditions has to make a decision that ends in death. They have the choice of drinking the dirty water and becoming sick or dehydrating and becoming sick. And most of these people are children. By the time you have finished reading this sentence one child would have died as one dies every 20 seconds due to water related issues.
Sanitation is one reason people don’t have access to clean water. Sanitation generally refers to the act of providing safe facilities for the distribution of human waste. The distribution of sewage should not be placed into a water supply. More people own a mobile phone than a toilet; 8 million people do not have access to a toilet. This is such a massive problem that Water Aid dedicated November 19 to be world toilet day, where they draw attention to 1 in 3 women worldwide that don’t have anywhere safe to go to the toilet.
Is a person’s way of life lowered by not having access to clean water? In Africa alone women and children spend 40 billion hours collecting water. This question has an answer in Tanzania where an 18-year-old girl called Rachel Anton lives. Rachel is from the Inonelwa village. She collects water from a puddle at the bottom of a pit, which she has to wait 3 hours in the boiling hot sun for, even though it is not clean. In the dry season she could wait from 5am to 11pm, as there is not much water in the hole it is harder to get. She hoes to fill 4 buckets a day, which she will use for cooking, cleaning, etc.
At only 14 Rachel is already married and has a son to care for. With reliable clean water
References: http://www.waterislife.com/ www.wateraid.org/uk/what_we_do/where_we_work/default.asp www.unesco.org/water/wwap/facts_figures/mdgs.shtml www.waterforlife.org/about.php www.wateraid.org/uk/what_we_do/sustainable_technologies/default.asp http://support.thewaterproject.org/home http://www.worldvision.com.au/Issues/WaterSanitationHygiene/WhatIsOurResponse.aspx?lpos=top_drop_2_Whatisourresponse http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml http://www.waterforlife.org/projects/brazil http:/thewaterproject.org