As we plan to soak away our sadness in a long hot shower from a day consisting of tryouts, practice, school, and parties, we use a lot more water than many people in a developing country do in a day.

Water is imperative to survival and in America, it is a very abundant resources. In other foreign countries such as Africa, they need water too survive, becuase 884 million people lack access to clean water; that’s almost 3 times the USA population. Finding clean water is a big problem, and so they are forced to drink dirty lake and river water.

In order to get water, people have to walk miles with big jugs on their heads, and usually these are very busy women and children who have to get the water. The water they get is also nowhere close to being like the clean, good quality water more developed countries have readily available to them.

According to WHO (world health organization), around 90% of incidences of water-related diseases are due to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene and is mostly concentrated on children in developing countries. Intestinal worms infect about 10% of the population of the developing world. Intestinal parasitic infections can lead to malnutrition, anaemia and stunted growth.

A big problem with this issue, is that a lot of people know about the lack of clean water, but they don’t do anything about it.

“If we aren’t personally affected, it’s hard to care. Until we raise awareness of this issue, we’re likely to continue living lavishly and somewhat selfishly.  We need constant reminders that people aren’t like us or that the things we take so for granted are, in fact, luxuries” said Ann Heyse, upper school English teacher.

There is a lot of hope for this issue. People just have to give some spare money to organizations that are completely non-profit, and will do all they can to give people clean, quality water. A couple of organizations are: Water.org, water.cc, who.int/en, globalwater.org, and charitywater.org. All websites make it easy for you to donate, and learn more.