For those of you who don't know my wife and I, our names are Justin and
Milessa Gauthier. We are a young couple and were married just over a
year ago. I
(Justin) am currently in my last year of university at the University of
Regina and work as a waiter
at The Keg. Milessa is a homemaker and spends some of her time
volunteering. This summer we opened and ran a small lawn care business in the city of Regina, Saskatchewan. We have talked about wanting
to start donating money and being more involved in charitable
organizations for quite a while, and finally have made up our minds to
become more involved!

Just over 2 years ago, I traveled to Africa on a 6 week mission trip
where I helped teach English to the locals with a church there. While teaching English did a
lot of good for a lot of people, being in Africa showed me other ways
help was needed. Since then, I have been wanting to support those less
fortunate in Africa in some way and found many excuses not to. Whether it
was lack of time, motivation or knowledge of how to help, it took me
over 2 years to really try to do something good to help those in need.

Over the last
few years, the fact that millions in Africa do not have clean water to
drink has become more well known. Millions of people die every year
simply because they don't have clean water. Knowing this has made it
clear to me
that those of us in relative wealth should be helping those who may not
even have access to clean drinking water. At first, I thought about
simply donating some money towards building a water well. Than I
realized that by starting a fundraiser, so much more
could be given to those in need. While one person can help a little bit,
many people can do so much more.

In Canada, we
are extremely blessed by our worldly possessions. Even if we consider
ourselves poor by Canadian standards, we are considered rich by the rest
of the world. While Canadians spend millions of dollars on bottled water
every year instead of simply drinking tap water for free, millions in
Africa die each year because they don't even have the option of drinking
free and healthy tap water.

Recently, Milessa and I read a section of a book called
'Increasing Our Faith' by her great grandpa Dryden Sinclair. The section
talked about how faith allows God to really work through us. How, if we
really have true faith, we should have no fear in doing His work and
giving of all we have to those who need it. We should know that if we
give of all we have, we can believe that God will still provide for us.
This reading hit me so hard because I have been questioning if we had
the funds and time to start a fundraiser. However, after hearing what
Dryden said about faith, it was obvious to us that we needed to start
doing more.

Milessa and I have decided to do a 'dollar-match'
fundraising project in an attempt to raise as much money as possible.
While we know supporting an entire water well ourselves would be out of
reach, we want to give what we can. To help build a water well in Kenya,
it costs approximately $7500, and that is our goal as we would like to
support the building of an entire well there. So we have decided to
match,
dollar-for-dollar, up to $2500. Our goal is to raise $7500, so if we can
raise $5000 from everyone, along with the $2500 we would like to match,
we will reach our goal of $7500.

When we stop to realize how fortunate we are, it should
be easy to give money to those less fortunate. So often, we choose to
buy
something for ourselves that might make us happy for a little while,
like a bike, a Slurpee, a coffee, a nicer car, etc.; How much more
fulfilling would it be to give that same money to a good cause and know
it helped save lives? By donating money to The Water Project, you can
know your money is going to go directly to helping provide clean water
to people in Africa who need it. When we consider that with our money we

could buy ourselves 2 hours of entertainment at a movie, or help save a
life, I think the choice is obvious.