fresh, clean water flows magically through underground pipes right into our kitchens, bathrooms, and gardens. americans use about 100 gallons of water per day. that's 854 pounds. that's about the weight of a concert grand piano. or perhaps you're more familiar with cows. a cow weighs around that much too.

one american 

in a single day 

uses a cow's weight in water.

entire families in many developing nations use only as much as the women and children of the family can carry back from the dirty stream, sometimes miles away. it usually ends up being less than 5 gallons per person.

the water-fetchers spend an average of 3 hours a day getting water, which keeps children from attending school and takes away any free time the women might have had to try to earn a little extra money to provide for her family. the roads become increasingly dangerous as the extremely vulnerable women and children get farther away from the village, and they must daily face the fear of being raped or mugged on their way to water that's not even clean. diseases caused by a lack of clean water and sanitation kills children under 5 at a rate of a jumbo jet crashing every four hours. a lack of access to clean water also makes crops hard to grow, and many people resort to irrigating their crops with wastewater (sewage). over 10% of people worldwide eat foods irrigated by disease carrying wastewater.

one in eight people on the earth live like this.

placing a clean-water well inside a needy village makes health, education, financial stability, and life in general exponentially more possible for the villagers.

so here's how this walk for water thing is gonna work:

first, we meet at the bell tower at etsu at ten o'clock in the morning on saturday, april twenty-third (the day before Easter). any buckets or water-carriers that you can possibly scrounge up would be very much appreciated. also, if you absolutely can't make it at ten, let me know when you can be there, and we can make arrangements for that. we will then walk the half mile to the creek behind pals, cookout, etc., carrying with us our buckets and containers to fill up at said creek. once we fill up our containers, we carry them right back to the bell tower, where they are weighed and emptied. we then repeat the walk as many times as we want.

the way this becomes a fundraiser for water charities is this: the walkers find sponsors to pledge a couple cents per pound of water the walker carries over from the creek. at the end of the day, totals are tallied, and the walkers contact their sponsors with their total weight, and the sponsors can fulfill their pledge by making a tax-deductible gift with their credit card on this very web page. simply click "donate now" and follow the steps. if other means of payment are preferable, they can be arranged.

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for more information on the water crisis you can visit the following pages:

http://www.wateraid.org/uk/what_we_do/statistics/default.asp

http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/

http://thewaterproject.org/water_scarcity.asp

http://thewaterproject.org/water_stats.asp