Imagine what daily life would be like without water…
Water is life; an indispensable precondition for human, animal and plant life!
Hopefully you never have or ever will experience the reality of not having immediate access to clean fresh water to drink, bathe or fulfil your daily needs and so please pause for a few moments… Imagine waking up one morning, turning on your tap as you do every morning to quench your thirst, brush your teeth and shower but today nothing happens, to compound this you now hear on the radio that you have no future access to local water supply.
What happens when the tap runs dry ?
Please consider that just for one day the only option available to you is to find a bucket and go in search of the nearest source of water. Let’s go one step further and pretend that the closest water supply is a well with a shared pump and is many miles away. Your only means of transportation to get there is walking. By the time you arrive you are already tired from walking over two hours in the blistering sun, thirsty and yet the hard work has only just begun. You join the busy and increasingly frantic queue of many people whom are in the same or even worse situation than you. When finally you get to fill up your bucket with precious water, that has now become unbearably heavy and yet you still face the long walk home which due to the weight and your fatigue, the return journey home now takes double the time it took you to get there.
You are dehydrated, hungry, exhausted and disorientated having trudged through the dark. Once you arrive home the water you have collected must then be boiled to kill bacteria, when cooled down fill a couple of water bottles for drinking and barely have enough water for a quick wash.
In silence and weary you then have time to reflect on the day you have just had and are quickly reminded that you have to do it all over again tomorrow and for the foreseeable future, again to support you and your family.
This all seems unbelievable and you would wake up from the nightmare to breathe a sigh of relief but in stark reality this is a routine which is reality and similar to the one carried out every single day by citizens living in these atrocious conditions. Unfortunately for millions of people around the globe, this is a very real-life daily experience and so hopefully by helping to create awareness to this global problem of water shortages, together we can all help by sharing how difficult life can be for people who do not have access to precious water.
Reasons for water shortages:
Natural causes include global warming (catastrophic climate change), lack of rains and floods (mainly unavoidable but collectively we can help slow it down).
Human causes include population, industrial works, pollution, bad consumption (mainly caused unnecessarily through over usage, wanton waste and can be avoided).
Having kindly taken the time to reflect and consider this unimaginable scenario, can you for a second imagine going out and washing your car with water but not from the tap or hose in your house but with the water from that resource which you walked miles to fetch, took you over five hours round trip to collect and whilst others people in desperate times queued behind you. How many times would you have to walk there and back to get enough water to wash your car and how many go short because the well ran dry that day? It really does make you think about how unnecessary washing a car with water is!
The world’s water resources are rapidly running dry, creating a global crisis for every living being on our planet with over 2 billion people worldwide living in areas of severe water stress and over 500 million in a state of chronic water shortage. Chronic means that something is ongoing and areas of the world that have chronic water shortages are always lacking water.
The time has come and never been more prevalent to shine out of the crowd and help protect the planet we all live… “It must not and does not have to cost the Earth to wash your car”
If you are still washing your car with water, please consider the other options that are available and do not compromise on your finish. If not for your own benefit but for the fact that so many people around the world simply do not have the same option as we do to simply turn a tap and water is instantly there. Stop wasting precious water – there is not enough of it to go around.
Whilst unfortunately we cannot predict what the future may bring, surely at the very least we can all try and do is to help today for a more sustainable tomorrow!