Clean Water
We have had a partnership with a small village outside of Siem Reap for a couple of years. Last year I delivered Shoe Boxes of love there and as I was leaving the village saw this guy struggling to ride a bike with no tires and thought,
“Wouldn’t it be like Jesus to get every kid in this village a bike.” So we partnered with a couple of others and what started out as a dream to give 50 kids in one village a bike resulted in 122 kids in two villages and two orphanages receiving new bikes.
When I visited this village a few months after my students had delivered the bikes our orphanage director was introducing us to people in the village and he remarked that many of them would get sick because their pump water wasn’t clean. That was a fallacy I had fallen victim to before. I keep assuming that because the water is coming out of the ground from a pump that it is clean and that isn’t always the case.
Our director asked us if we could get them a $25 water filter so that they could have clean water in the village. I wish I had known that 2 years ago when we started coming to this village. Perhaps in the future we will be able to offer something a little more permanent that doesn’t require them to go through the additional step of running the water through a filter before drinking it.
Water is something we totally take for granted in the west. Our house in South East Asia often goes without water. We have 3 water tanks to try to avert the problem but inevitably we run out of water. Generally we have drinking water because we get that delivered weekly. Last time I was back in the United States I remember thinking, “Wow, Americans have so much good water they can use it to wash cars and water the lawn.” I have lived my whole life virtually not even thinking about water but after 3 + years of making sure that bad water doesn’t get into my mouth in the shower or wondering about ice at a restaurant and going about 4 months in the last two years without water in our house to do the dishes, take showers and most importantly, flush toilets, I no longer take it for granted.
Anyway, just wanted to share with you a tiny little project of Stop Slavery and bringing a water filter to a village in Cambodia. Thanks for all of you who are a part of our support team. If you aren’t already you should go to the Donate page and choose 1000 Heroes and become one of the 1000 Heroes we are looking to have join us in 2014.