Water. It is essential to all known forms of life. At this moment, 1.1 billion people live without access to clean, safe water. That’s about the number of people in all of North America and Europe or 4 times the population of the United States.
These people, simply because of where they were born and live, are forced to use unclean, unsafe water or simply go without.
Why is it that some of us are granted unlimited access to this basic ingredient of life? We drink it. Wash our clothes with it. Water the grass, and even flush our toilets with it.
Thousands die each day from the lack of safe, clean water.
For these people, collecting and consuming water is often a gamble for their life.
Most times the water they drink is muddy. The water they drink can be contaminated by the animals they share it with. Families and children become sick and people get diseases like Diarrhea, Dysentery, Influenza, Typhoid Fever, Hepatitis A, Malaria and suffer from constant stomach pain and worms. Yeah, these are diseases that people died from when you played the old Oregon Trail game… but THIS is real life.
So many people die simply due to drinking unsafe water.
Here’s a scary fact:
A child dies from diarrhea EVERY 15 SECONDS.
Can you imagine one of your kids dying simply because they took a drink of water? Stop and think about that…. Could you imagine losing your child to something so preventable?
HALF of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by by patients suffering from water-related diseases.
Women often walk up to 7 miles for that dirty water in the dry season. Millions of women spend 15-20 hours per week collecting water. Because of that, they waste a lot of time doing that work. They travel 4 to 6 hours sometimes just for clean water. Of people who lack clean water, one in three live on less than $1 a day.
The scriptures remind us that to those whom have been given much, much will be required. One of the most passionate and oft-repeated teachings of Jesus is to care for the poor. The scriptures don’t simply instruct us to have faith without action. By nature, they call us to act.
Water and well projects help reduce the burden on women and children of collecting water for their family’s daily needs. With the installation of a well, children are able to attend school and help dig their families out of poverty. Wells reduce the occurance of disease and death due to water-born contaminants.
In the drought-stricken areas of our world, a well can mean an end to a nomadic lifestyle. An end to roaming through the desparate, detached communities in search of food, shelter, and water. A well creates a public gathering place, a place to call home.
How You Can Help…
Organizations such as Living Water International and World Vision are partnering with communities around the world. They bring in equipment and crews and train indigenous people to dig wells and to take care of them. There are many organizations that provide this service, but these 2 in particular also share the gospel in the villages they work in and educate the villagers on health and safety issues.
In the last 4 years, my husband and I adopted a baby from Kazakhstan. While I was doing the research to pick out 
