By Barbara Goldberg
The cover story in this week’s Time magazine is “The Poisoning of an American City.” When something makes the cover of a publication that’s been in existence for almost 100 years, you know it’s serious.
In the case of Flint, Michigan, it’s about incompetent leaders who betrayed their city when they decided to draw its water from the Flint River instead of buying Lake Huron water from Detroit in order to save money. Residents in this ailing, majority African American, industrial city started experienced burning skin, hand tremors, hair loss, even seizures. On January 20, they declared a state of emergency and the National Guard starting distributing bottled water.
In Niger, West Africa, death and disease from unsafe water happens every day, not because of the incompetence of their village chiefs, but because they simply lack a source of clean water. The clean water they so desperately need is 250-300 ft underground. But they can’t reach it, not by digging.
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| {source: Gil Garcetti} |
That’s where Wells Bring Hope comes in—drilling wells to bring safe water to a place in the world where people are used to babies and young children dying from contaminated water, water that is shared with animals. For a moment, just imagine yourself as a mother living with the constant fear that the water you give your child could kill him? When you visit Niger, you come away saying, “Thank God I was born in America.” When President Obama visited Michigan he said, “I know that if I were a parent…I would be beside myself that my kids’ health could be at risk.”
A state of emergency exists every day in Niger and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. When you think that all it takes is $5,600 to bring safe water to a whole village, roughly 650 people, why wouldn’t you donate a few bucks? Or, better yet, commit to donating a few bucks every month. Just $30 will bring safe water to one person for a lifetime. It’s a drop in the bucket that will save lives.
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