Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink!

My Dad used to quote this when I was a kid. I later learned it’s taken from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It refers to a story of sailors at sea with no drinking water on board, unable to drink the salt water all around them.

But, what if you weren’t at sea? What if you looked out and saw water, but it still wasn’t drinkable?

As much as I might complain about having to drink water, it’s required for life and health, and there are millions (estimated 750 million people) who don’t have safe water readily available to them. This is a real problem – and a serious one.

March 22 is World Water Day, a day set aside to bring awareness to the World Water Crisis. Every year, water-related illnesses, poor sanitation, and lack of hygiene claim the lives of 840,000 people . . . and tragically, 90 percent of them are children. (Want to talk about things getting real? That’s around 756,000 children!)

It’s not just about drinking contaminated water, there are also the real dangers of women and children walking for miles to wait in line for water, possibly becoming prey for sexual predators, and then walking the same miles back carrying jerry cans with up to 40 lbs of water for their family.

The World Help staff did their best to carry these jerry cans in this humorous video:

Lifting Kirinda’s Burden | World Help from World Help on Vimeo.

As a World Help blogger, I want to help shine the light on this real problem. For World Water Day, World Help is focusing our efforts on the Ugandan community of Kirinda. Its children have been victims of the effects of contaminated drinking water for generations. World Help hopes to provide clean water to all 2,000 people in the region through a variety of clean-water projects.

Would you be able to help, even in a small way, to help provide water for Kirinda? Learn more or give here.

While this post did take longer than 5 minutes to write, I was inspired to go through with it because of the #fmfparty prompt of “Real” this week, so I’m linking up with Kate Motaung and the Five Minute Friday bloggers.