Today is
Blog Action Day 2010 and the focus is on Water. Here is a blurb from
their site:
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.
Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.
My brief post this morning on the subject is from Adam Hamilton, the senior pastor of the church I attend. Adam visited the Republic of Malawi in southeast Africa in August and told about the plight of folks there to find clean drinking water. Following are a few photos that he took and some things he shared with us.
"I'm writing this e-mail from Lilongwe, Malawi. As you read this I am traveling with my family and a team from Resurrection to several villages an hour north of the Lilongwe. We're meeting with church and community leaders as we consider what God may be calling us to do in mission in Malawi for the coming year."
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| The women of this village walk 15 minutes with buckets to retrieve drinking and cooking water from this stream - the water is unsafe to drink and makes the children sick. The hope of this village is for a "bore hole" - a well with safe drinking water like this one (below) that serves as many as 7,000 people from the surrounding area. |
"There are villages here where the women awake at 3:00 am to begin the walk with their 5 gallon buckets to where there is safe, clean drinking water for their family. The wells (they call them "bore holes") cost roughly $8,000 to drill. We'll look at sites where they hope we might consider helping the churches to provide wells and water for their villages."
Adam has shared more about this need at church and it looks like the church will be partnering with churches in Malawi to build water wells. It blows me away how so much of humanity has to drink unhealthy water. I pray that efforts to bring these "bore holes" to Malawi and other places will have much success.
Americans and American Christians as a whole do not know what the "hard life" or what suffering is.
ReplyDeleteAmerican's think they suffer when they can't buy the second car or they can't go out to eat three times a week. Bit of an stretch I know, but how dare we and how arrogant are we to think we suffer when some many believers and even non-believers make less than 10.00 a year and have no safe water.