Good thing I’m living alone in this tent because it’s been 9 days without a ‘decent’ hot shower. Certainly the camping sun shower is adequate and I grudgingly admit it does the job with much less water. It’s true, at home I linger under the clean free-flowing hot water.

When we brush our teeth , how often do we let the water run in the sink?

Here’s a fun Internet site created in Australia with activities to sensitize ourselves about how we use and abuse water. http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/ceoteach/taps/wateruse/water_use.htm.   Makes me think twice about how I use water.

Water:  Ndiaw Ndiaw: Rural Senegal
At Ndiaw Ndiaw, 5 hours into the desert by car from Dakar, there is no fresh water. We bathed with a tea kettle from standing well water. If I had woken there this morning, as a woman, my first task would have been to walk 3 miles to a neighboring village where there was an operational well pump.

Go ahead. Imagine you’re carrying 5 gallons of water on your head in a bucket. I used to slop most of it over the sides just walking from the village barrel to my hut. My attempts generated raucous laughter.

I’m just sure I could hear the men thinking, she’s not married, she has no children, she can’t even carry water ~ what good is she?

The water burden falls most heavily on women in developing countries. Girls are denied education because they are sent to fetch water. As adults, women often take 3-4 hours each day searching for water.

Here’s a startling statistic:
884 million people in our world lack access to clean water

That’s about 1 in 5 people who don’t have access to clean water. If you’re a family of five, pick one person in your family who must drink water from a puddle on the street.  Pretty scary.

It’s a crisis killing as many as 5,000 children a day – the equivalent of 20 airliners filled with children lost EVERY DAY to an entirely preventable public health crisis.

If you feel compelled to act on water issues, check out these two sites:

http://tapproject.org/

http://www.endwaterpoverty.org/