Not all people have clean water
Water is life's most precious resource. For most of us, water flows freely. It’s only ever the turn of a faucet or the press of a button away.
We wake up and use it, take breaks to use it, clean our dishes and clothes with it; clean water has become a normal part of life.
Many people aren’t so fortunate. 663 million people don’t have access to clean water and use dirty water daily. What happens when you live without clean water? You start to experience a lot of negative side effects.
Dirty Water Causes Big Problems, But we can solve them
Dirty water is at the root of many problems. If we can give people clean water, many problems downstream are eliminated.
One area where water has a big effect is education. Yearly 443 million days of school are missed due to preventable water-related diseases.
The rate at which girls complete school is much lower than boys. 1 in 4 girls does not complete primary school, compared to 1 in 7 for boys.
In Africa alone, women spend over 40 billion hours collecting water. That means less time for school.
Dirty water is deadly
The World Health Organization(WHO) estimates that 842,000 deaths per year are caused by diarrhea as a result of unsafe drinking-water, sanitation, and hand hygiene. Of those 842,000 deaths/yr, 361,000 are children under 5
There are more deaths attributed to dirty water yearly than all forms of violence combined, including war.
All thought dirty water is a big problem, people are working hard on solving the problem.
Beautiful solutions: This Teacher and Clean Water are changing Kids Lives
Netra Bahadur Pulami grew up in the Sindhuli District of Nepal. As a child, he attended the Shree secondary school; one of the few schools in the area that offers Kindergarten through 12th-grade education.
Netra says he remembers making the long trek up the mountain to get to the classroom when he could make it.
“We often had diarrhea and stomach aches. After dinner, I would sometimes vomit. There were a lot of problems back then.”
It was difficult for Netra or any of his classmates to stay healthy enough to attend school regularly. Families in the area relied on rivers and ponds for things like cooking, washing, and drinking.
Ultimately, many of Netra’s friends ended up dropping out, but Netra persevered and graduated. He had to retake many of his English classes that he had failed but slowly, he passed them all.
Netra quickly knew after graduating that he wanted to become an English teacher. He wanted to make it easier for others to learn English because it had been so difficult for him.
“If I can help children learn better English, they’ll face less hardship than I faced. I’ll be very happy to have done so.”
Netra Started teaching at The Shree Secondary School in 2009. The biggest change came a few years later in 2013 when Nepal Water for Health, a Charity: Water local partner, began building a gravity-fed water system.
The system was designed to capture spring water from the high mountains and deliver it to taps around the Sindhuli community. That changed everything.
Life With Clean Water
Homes now had access to safe drinking water and people no longer had to drink the water from ponds and rivers. The effects were instant and the health of the community changed drastically.
Before the new water system, the local clinic would see 700 patients per month. After the water system was built, that dropped to 60-65 patients per month.
The diarrhea cases dropped from 6000 per year to 200 per year.
The schools transformed. The teachers began teaching the importance of hygiene and health for students. More students started filling the classrooms.
Student no longer faced the same problems that Netra had faced. Netra started teaching his students not only English but about many subjects.
He was inspiring students to think about how they could change their communities.
“When I was little, there was no such thing as dreaming to be an engineer, teacher, or pilot.” Netra said. “Because the environment didn’t nurture such kinds of ambition.”
“The difference is between heaven and earth.”
The kids in the community started dreaming. Dreaming about making medicines, becoming doctors, engineers, and social workers.
Suddenly, a barrier that had been impeding the community disappeared.
With Clean Water Everything Changes
Clean water does amazing things for people and their communities. School attendance goes up, deaths go down, and communities start to advance.
Safe water is an essential backbone to modern human society. Having access to clean water allows towns and villages to spend less time dealing with retrieving water and more time getting educated and solving other problems.
We can end the water crisis if we work together. We have the tools to fix the problem, we just need the resources to do it. Join our mission and help us end dirty water.