Imagine a day without water…
Water is life; an indispensable precondition for human, animal and plant existence!
Hopefully you never have nor ever will experience the reality of not having the immediate access to clean fresh water; to drink, bathe in or fulfil your daily needs and functions. Unthinkable isn’t it and so please pause for just a few moments for reflection… Try to imagine waking up one morning and upon turning your tap, which has been your ever present water source for many years; to quench your thirst, brush your teeth, shower, boil your breakfast egg and yet this morning nothing happens. Surprisingly today no water runs freely and to compound things and your frustration even further you have just heard on the radio and confirmed on the TV that now there is no future access to any 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 water source. Let’s go one step further and pretend that the closest water supply is a ground well with a shared pump and is many, many miles away. Your only means of transportation to get there is by walking. Once you eventually 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 arduous walk home which due to the download shoulder 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, once cooled down only fills a couple of water bottles for drinking and barely enough water for a quick wash.
In silence and weary you then have time to reflect on the day’s events that you have just experienced, reality swiftly kicks in and you are reminded that you have the daunting task to do it all over again and not just tomorrow, but for the foreseeable future, again and again to support you and your family.
This all seems so unbelievable and wake up from the nightmare to breathe a huge sigh of relief; but in stark reality this is a routine, not familiar, but identical to the one carried out every single day by citizens living in these atrocious conditions. Unfortunately for millions of fellow human beings 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 educate by sharing how difficult life can be for people who quite simply do not have access to ‘taken for granted’ 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 taken from that resource which you walked miles to fetch, took you over five arduous hours round trip to collect and whilst other people also 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 people go short because their well also ran dry that day? Consciously it really does and should make us think about how unnecessary washing a car with water is and how precious water really 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 nor regrettably what the future may bring to us all; however collectively the very least we can do is our utmost to help towards securing a more sustainable tomorrow.