The Affero Blog

Clean Water

By Steven McLaughlin in News

27May, 2010

I want to write about clean water, I really do, but I have a problem. I have no idea what life is like without it. My average day starts like this.

I wake up, start a pot of coffee and use the bathroom. I take a shower, I shave and I enjoy my coffee. The day moves on and I have yet to even think about water.

Most days my teaching team gets to teach outside. This season in particular we get to teach baseball. We have the opportunity to teach kids what running the bases looks like. We get to teach them what catching a pop fly looks like, as well as teaching them how to throw to the cut off to get an out at third and hopefully back to second to teach what a triple play is, if we’re lucky.

These kids stay pretty healthy throughout all of this. They have the ability to change into clean clothes if they need and take medicine if they need. I alone get the chance to take a break in an air-conditioned room and have a solid quart of water and get ready to do it all over again for the next class, never thinking about the fact that clean water gets us through all of this.

I have a friend who is a carpenter by trade. For some ignorant reason when I think of carpenters I think of old guys sitting in rocking chairs whittling away at fallen tree limbs, hoping to make picnic benches and rocking chairs in their free time. Unbeknownst to me, carpenters are a lot more than that and I have done them a lot of injustice in my predisposed thoughts of them.

I want to be the first to say that my ideas of clean water are warped, just misplaced and wrong. After looking into it I want to throw my hands up and say I am unable to be changed in my knowledge of clean water because I am so twisted in my non-knowledge of it.

My carpenter friend reminded me though that he LOVES to work with pieces that are warped. That it brings out this creativity in him that he cannot explain where it comes from. Warped wood is this adventure, out of seemingly nowhere, that keeps him going during the most tedious of jobs.

My idea on what clean water is may be intrinsically warped due to my life as a person coming from the Midwest of the States, and it is something I’ve never been without, but my point is this. There is hope in that I don’t think I’m too warped to not be malleable enough to understand, to be bent into a new thing, to get it, really comprehend what it’s like to be without clean water.

We have links on the site, go ahead, check them out, it only takes minutes to understand the problem of clean water. It takes hours and days and weeks to figure out how to help, but it only takes minutes to understand how warped you might be when it comes to clean water. It’s ok though if you’re warped, a lot of us are.

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