Intangible Thirst
Articles / Clean Water, Lifewater International
Written by: Steven McLaughlin
I feel as if I have used this space to write ad nauseum about the grave ills in the world that not only discomfort our fellow human beings, but lead also to their demise. I hope this post is less of that and more helping to lead to a better understanding of why what you do on a monthly basis through your gift is important.
For example, of course you know that people are hungry, children need schooling and people need houses to live in. These are not grandiose theorems that are hotly debated amongst the nation’s leading scholars; rather, they are realities that you know to exist via your own experiences in life. Maybe you have an inkling of what it feels like when your stomach grumbles or you have a headache and find it difficult to think straight because you missed lunch. There’s a probability that you have felt the wind’s sting on a blustery day when a bus was missed or a car broke down. At some point you may even have experienced what it’s like to feel as if you could not advance further beyond in your career field due to a lack of education. These things seem like common sense because the experiences are just that; common.
When it comes to the importance of clean water, I think that we tend to brush it off as “someone else’s problem.” A struggle that is neither relevant to your current state in life, nor small enough that you can personally give clean water to someone in need.
Sure we can spend our time tutoring a student at a local school, or buy a sandwich for the person standing by the side of the highway with a beat up cardboard sign that’s been scrawled upon with a sharpie impeding you to help out any way you can. These are tangible things you can do in order to alleviate someone else’s pain.
You can’t exactly fly to Sub-Sahara Africa with a few gallons of water to help ensure that people are drinking from a water source that is separate from the water source that hundreds of others are using as a source to clean themselves.
Even helping get clean water to areas that are nearby doesn’t always lead to a solution as to why there isn’t access to clean water in the first place. Rare is the opportunity that one has to build a new waterworks system in a city that’s been devastated by a hurricane, tsunami, or just plain lack of maintenance.
I think these are the reasons that clean water tends to be pushed to the back of our minds when it comes to issues to tackle, we can’t fix it easily and therefore it lacks a tangible solution.
However starting in the 1960s, the William Ashe and his family took outings into Baja, Mexico, to help orphanages, camps, and churches install new water systems. These outings, the relationships that were build and the need that was discovered became the foundations of what we know today as Lifewater International.
Lifewater International is an organization which seeks to provide tangible solutions to an issue that is beyond the grasp of many of us. That is why Affero has proudly partnered with them to support their vision of reducing and eventually eliminating the desperate need for clean water to the parts and people of the world that lack the resources to provide clean water for themselves.
Check them out and consider what you can do for to help provide clean water for those in need.
-Steve
Karyn
This is amazing! I can’t wait to get up to speed with the organizations you promote and causes you are helping!
Do you do anything with human trafficking?