COMMENTARY: Water, Water Everywhere…

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is the author of five books and a member of the board of World Vision International.) On hot summer days most American children head for the water. They dive into swimming pools, run through sprinklers and squirt each other with ever more sophisticated water guns. They guzzle […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the author of five books and a member of the board of World Vision International.)

On hot summer days most American children head for the water.


They dive into swimming pools, run through sprinklers and squirt each other with ever more sophisticated water guns.

They guzzle from fountains, gulp down sports drinks and slurp popsicles.

At the end of the day they head for a bath or shower. By the time the average American child settles into bed he or she has come into contact with gallons of cool, clean water.

But for most of the world’s children, water is so rare that thousands die each and every day for lack of a sip.

Some will die of thirst, other of famines caused by drought. Most will grow sick because the only water available to them is contaminated with bacteria. A simple case of diarrhea will be a death sentence for thousands of children under the age of 5 each day.

The magnitude of the world’s water divide is so great it is hard to imagine. But the reality of it is fresh for me because I spent the last week in Bolivia.

Bolivia is one of only two landlocked countries in all of South America, making it different from most countries in that it has no harbor or beach. But worse, it has a water crisis that means that in rural areas, nearly 94 percent of all homes have no potable water or sanitary waste systems.

The lack of clean water is one of the main reasons that almost 15 percent of the children in rural areas die before their fifth year.

The water crisis is not just a rural phenomenon. In Cochabamba, the nation’s third-largest city, many of its more than half-million residents rioted recently over the lack of an adequate and affordable water system.


About 45 minutes outside the city I visited a rural area where World Vision Bolivia is working in an area development project. There, the international relief and development organization is assisting residents in meeting the most critical needs as they identify them.

In a “town meeting” on a dusty hillside, residents voiced their opinions about their needs. It wasn’t surprising that most related to water.

I had just visited the community’s prized well, an enterprise that had taken them a year to complete because the area’s low water table and extremely hard rocks mean drill bits are broken regularly.

But hitting water was only the beginning. Pumping it is expensive because of the high cost of electricity. The water is pumped for only two hours a day and must supply the entire region.

Residents voiced their concerns about those in outlying areas who still can’t reach the water. They spoke of the high cost of electricity and the need to find an alternative such as a water tower.

They also spoke about the need for more than drinking water, including water for their small garden and to give to their animals. A fetid pond nearly half a mile away was the only alternative water source.


Some of the men were late to the meeting because they were cleaning out the trench that skirts the perimeter. There wouldn’t be rain again for months, but they kept it clean just in case a surprise storm came and offered them valuable water. When I looked at the dusty ditch I realized how quickly the rainwater would become contaminated.

The men spoke of someday lining the ditch with bricks, of extending their pipes from the well, of their dream of having a water tower.

One man stood with his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. She was dressed in her finest clothes for the occasion, but they were already dusty and soiled from the blowing dirt. “We must find a better way for our children,” he said through a translator. “We do not want them to spend their whole lives searching for water.”

I promised I would try to find help for this man and his community. And perhaps that’s why I was so struck when I got off the airplane just a few days later and saw my children and others with such an abundance of water.

The Bible is full of water imagery, perhaps because in the Middle East water was and still is a precious commodity. Jesus asked his followers to give “a cup of cold water” in his name as a demonstration of love.

For many of the world’s children, just a cup of clean water would make the difference between life and death. For those of us with so much abundance, it seems like such a small thing.


DEA END BOURKE

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