For several years now, Change.org has sponsored “Blog Action Day” in order to harness the communication skills of bloggers to initiate an annual discussion on some topic of global significance. This year, the topic is water. How simple, right? For many of us, water is something that we take for granted, even if we know that we shouldn’t. I remember, shamefully, a conversation I had with my college roommate when we were figuring out expenses needed to move into our own flat. She had suggested we include water on our list of utilities and I remember being surprised and saying, “What do you mean? We have to pay for water?” Embarassing, but not surprising.

More recently, the problem of the availability of clean water was brought home to me during our family trip to Cambodia and my subsequent involvement with that country. While there, we worked with several charities helping the poorest. I had never seen such poverty before. It seemed so overwhelming and I began to wonder how my family and I could even begin to make a difference. The answer, as explained by the charity Tabitha (www.tabithauk.com)was really quite simple. Dig wells. Most of the poorest communities we visited were so poor because they had no access to clean water. No wells. And that meant not only health problems, but the inability to grow crops, raise animals, farm, which in turn means no ability to raise themselves out of their poverty. For the equivalent of £80, we could provide an entire village with a well. I then began to realise that without clean water, that most basic commodity of all, there could be no health, no education, no jobs, no future. Everything began with water.
The Blog Action Day website at blogactionday.change.org explains that
* almost a billion people do not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
* unsafe water causes 80% of diseases and kills more people than violence and war
* billions of people, mostly women and children, spend vast percentages of their days walking miles to collect water for themselves and families. Nearby wells would provide them with the gifts of time and energy to pursue their health, livelihood, education.

I am pleased to be able to use my blog to contribute to this dialogue. We are lucky to live on a planet which, so far, provides us with the water we need. Access to that water is a basic human right that we who live on this planet all share, like the sunshine above our heads and the ground beneath our feet.