What If You Couldn't Get a Glass of Clean Water...Ever!
Thirsty? Walk over to your sink, turn on the faucet and imagine nothing but a stream of dark, gritty, river water running into your best crystal goblet...
You wouldn't drink that, right?
But millions do...daily. And thousands die from it.
I've been lucky enough to spend substantial time in Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, Mexico and China. I know this water problem is real. I've seen it.
While driving to our small village in Ethiopia, I saw families bathing and filling water buckets in streams where cattle were also wading, bathing and defecating within a few feet of them.
My family, living in a tiny Ethiopian village, employed a 16-year old girl to bring two five-gallon jerry cans full of clean water on a donkey from the village well nearly a half mile away six times a day, every day, 7 days a week to fill their holding tank. A shower was a very precious - and fast - activity.
Clean water - or the lack of it - poses "a major threat to human health. Diarrhoeal disease alone amounts to an estimated 4.1 % of the total global burden of disease and is responsible for the deaths of 1.8 million people every year," according to the World Health Organization (WHO).