H2O for Life Schools is a great nonprofit with which to end our first week. This one is for my friend Katie, who changes my life and the eyes through which I see the world and myself quite often. Her book along with co-author Mark Bowles, Just Keep Rowing, explores Katie's journey as the youngest person to ever row a boat solo across the Atlantic Ocean (yes, ROW - alone - across an entire ocean!) , and she has done this and so much more to raise awareness and funds to help the world water crisis. I got to hear about Katie's follow up visit to one of the wells they built, so I can highly recommend it. I especially recommend looking more in depth at H2O for Life if you are a teacher, because "H2O for Life's service-learning opportunity is designed to engage, educate, and inspire youth to become global citizens."
These points are from H2O for Life's site, but there is much more to learn and know, believe me.
▪ Every 20 seconds a child dies from lack of access to clean water.
▪ Women and children in many communities spend up to 60 percent of each day walking to collect water.
▪ 4,500 children die each day due to unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation.
▪ Without access to a latrine, many girls stop going to school once they reach puberty.
H2O for Life has taken the idiom about teaching someone to fish being ideal rather than giving a person a fish. - only they do it at a community level. H2O for life helps with the building of borehole wells, rainwater catchment tanks, hand washing stations, and latrines. The community learns to diagnose and repair, initiate sanitation programs, test, and more. Then since basic human needs are being better achieved, they can expand into crop irrigation, which is even more self sustaining. H2O for Life educates in sanitation and hygiene, which, when applied with the new systems, reduces illness, disease, and death. Having wells leads to less time and physical energy spent collecting water, which allows for more time for education for students, less danger in collecting water, fewer injuries, and less danger, for women especially, in eliminating at night. H2O for Life is not a bandage, instead it is a long term initiative to fully address a community's water problem with a sustainable system. I am happy to have learned so much (way more than I could write in a few pages, much less right here) about this.
The other feature is that schools in America partner with schools in the country of need. American schools can have access to the lesson plans and to crate their own fundraising, awareness, and inspirational events to engage the local community for WASH (WAter Sanitation and Hygiene), creating awareness and initiative in our youth with inspiration and creativity. The Today Show video below shows some of the excitement students find, and I thought the idea to walk with the buckets of water to better experience the situation was particularly clever.
I think the school partnerships sound exciting and fun, so if any schools near me decide to do this, I would be honored to help in any way I can.
Water Use It Wisely offers many tips, such as this one: if you turn off the water while brushing your teeth, you could conserve up to 200 gallons of water per month.
Cheers to charity - and thank you Liv and Liv
As a side note, for those of you who prefer your daily dose of Donations by the Dozen via email, I did put a subscription box on the www.GraceInIt.org web page
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