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by Sachin-14, 12 June 2008
When was the last time you left the tap water running while you were brushing your teeth?
Was that time one month ago, one week ago, or even this morning perhaps?
Did you know that turning the taps off when you brush your teeth can save up to five liters of water a minute?
Each flush of the toilet uses the same amount of water that one person in the Third World uses all day for washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking. Every time you flush the toilet - be it just now, in the interval before coming in here - or yesterday, that is the total amount of water one person in Africa uses each day.
Water is precious and should not be wasted. A large number of people - 1.1 billion, according to the United Nations do not have access to clean water. 1.1 billion! That is 157 times the number of people living in Hong Kong today. The water that we use to wash our cars or flush our toilets is cleaner than the water drunk by millions of people on this planet. As many as 3, 4, 5,000 children are dying everyday, mostly from diseases contracted from drinking contaminated water - preventable diseases.
Is it really acceptable to witness such a tragedy happen everyday in the 21st century? These lives could be saved.
Imagine if 10 jumbo 747s crashed every day! That would be 5,000 lives lost every day and over 150,000 lives lost every month.
Imagine if most of those people on the planes were children.
Imagine what the reaction would be. The world would be in chaos! World leaders would be frantically trying to figure out a solution to this problem.
What if you knew that an equal number of casualties do occur every day - not as a result of plane crashes, but as a result of unclean drinking water? Tragically, 5,000 children die every day as a result of water-born diseases in developing areas of the world such as Africa. Dirty water kills a child every 15 seconds. Before you reach the end of this blog, four more young and innocent children, who have not had their chance to discover the world, will be dead.
We are a privileged generation, and we must share what little extra we have with people who aren’t as lucky as us. People in need, people who suffer because they do not have enough - enough water to drink. People who have to walk 10 miles to a stream before they can drink water - water dirtier even than the water we wash our cars with.
The answer to this is global awareness. Share the word of this problem and people will donate money to much-needed funds such as well-building foundations in Africa. Funds like this provide the only means of reaching clean water in Africa, and clean water is exactly the answer to these thousands of problems, from malaria to food shortages.
Global awareness is the first step to a recovery, because only if the world works together, can we overcome a large problem such as this.
Spread the word, and even if you feel you can’t make a difference, if one single person here tells their family what I told you, and their family passes on the word to their friends. If one person donates even a small sum of money to a well-building charity, you and I will have changed the lives of at least 100 people in Africa.
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