Ryan's first well in Northern Uganda
I first heard about Ryan Hreljac from my daughter. He has an inspiring story. A seemingly ordinary young boy from Kemptville, Ontario, he saw the great inequality in the world, and he decided to do something about it. In 1998 when he learned in class about the thousands of people in Africa who are sick and dying every day because they had no access to drinking water, the six-year old was baffled. He couldn't understand how people could die from lack of water, when it was just a matter of turning on a tap.
He pursued his curiosity and found out that drinking water was a foreign concept to Africa. The only water used was for cooking. He also learned that water was Africa’s biggest constraint to development. Then he learned that an entire well could be built in one of these places where it was so desperately needed – for a mere $70. Ryan asked his parents if he could have seventy dollars. When they inquired why their son wanted the money Mr and Mrs Hreljac agreed to help him to find ways of raising it. Eventually Ryan raised his seventy dollars by doing extra chores for his neighbors and for his parents around the house.
Next he contacted WaterCan, a non-profit organization which provides clean water to developing countries. The people at WaterCan were very inspired and touched by Ryan’s enthusiasm and hope, but they had to tell him that it actually cost $2000 to build a well! Ryan was ready do more chores. His parents, knowing that their windows could only be washed so many times, decided to join him in his cause and established The Ryan’s Well Foundation to raise money for their son's dream.
In January 1999, The Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR) drilled ‘Ryan’s Well’ beside Angolo Primary School in northern Uganda. When Ryan was given the opportunity to see his well, the experience made him realize that he could do even more. So he did! By the end of 2004, thirteen-year-old Ryan and his organization had helped raise over one million dollars for 137 water projects in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Guyana and Guatemala!
Today, millions of people around the world are now helping Ryan and his foundation. People are helping him raising funds, by conserving water, and by showing our most valuable resource the respect that it deserves. Imagine what could be done if every time – instead of buying bottled water – people decided to fill up a water bottle for free from a tap? They could give the money saved to Ryan’s Well or another organization that works on solving water problems.
Commodification of water refers to the buying and selling of water, turning it into a product with a dollar value rather than a basic human right to which everyone has access. Massive transnational corporations have taken over the control of water management in rich and poor countries alike, often jacking up prices and limiting access to clean water for the poor.
By filling reusable water bottles from the tap, we could be decreasing the use of plastic bottles that go the landfills or already over-crowded recycling plants, as well as avoiding putting money into the coffers of large corporations who have privatized water sources which is largely responsible for the unequal access of people to water around the world in poor countries.
Water is our most valuable resource which we share with 15 million other species on this planet, yet it has been ignored by countries who have it. We take it for granted, thinking that it is and will always be there. How can we not think so when all we do is turn on the tap to wash our hands, brush our teeth, take showers and baths, wash our cars, fill our swimming pools or irrigate our lawns? Many of us live near lakes or rivers. Think of the Great Lakes, all the seas, and the blue oceans. Our planet is covered in water! There’s water all over the place – in fact, even our bodies are made up of about seventy percent water!
Since water is essential to our very ability to survive, people are bound to get upset when they don’t have any and others have so much. No wonder so many predict that as a droplet of clean water becomes smaller and more sought after, humankind will witness even more inequity, exploitation and conflict, and that “the wars of the next century will be about water.”(Barlow and Clark “Blue Gold”)
To stay alive, a human being needs 2.4 litres of water a day. Studies, however show that he average Canadian uses 343 litres of water every single day! That is almost 150 times more than what we need! This compares to 200 litres used by the average person in Sweden, and 150 litres used by a person in France respectively! Where does all that water go when, in under-developed countries, people can hardly find a single drop of clean water to drink?
In a fairly recent study (Barlow and Clark “Blue Gold”) the US Natural Resources Defense Council looked at 103 brands of bottled water and found that one-third of those sources actually contained contaminants that include bacteria, arsenic and synthetic chemicals at such levels that exceed health guidelines.
WATER MYTHS
In spite of all the beautiful lakes, oceans and rivers that surround us we live in a rather thirsty and polluted world which we are destroying at an amazing speed. Is there really anything we can do about it as world citizens? It’s time to look deeper and ask questions regarding the water situation!
Following are some myths I lifted from the book put out by The Otesha Project.
Myth 1: All sewage in Canada is treated and disposed of properly.
In Canada, one trillion litres of untreated sewage are dumped into waterways every year. This volume would cover the entire 7,800 km length of the Trans-Canada highway to a depth of 20 meters! For coastal cities like Halifax and Victoria, that means sewage dumped directly into the ocean!
Try swimming or canoeing around in that!
Where does the sewage in your town go?
Myth 2: We do not have the financial resources to supply clean water to the world.
Canadians manage to scrounge up $17.2 billion for alcohol and tobacco, and $28.6 billion for clothes, every year. It would cost only $14 billion US to provide clean water and sanitation for everyone in the world. That means that if Canadians gave up one-third of their booze and clothes budgets, saved that money for just one year, and donated it to organizations that provide safe drinking water, then everyone on the planet could access safe water!
It isn’t a question of whether or not we can—it’s a question of whether or not we will!
Myth 3: My consumer choices do not affect water issues. Bet again.
Canada’s factories collectively use 16.5 billion litres of water a day, enough for the daily drinking needs of 6,892,694,063 people. It takes 400,000 litres of water to produce a single car, and another 500 litres per fill-up to produce the gas!
Think unequal access: In many countries, water that could be used by local people and farmers for survival is instead used to create export goods such as computers, clothing and gasoline for wealthy consumers in developed countries (like Canada and the US!).
Think pollution: The food we buy has major effects on water pollution. We’ve already seen that animals raised for food produce more poop than we do, and it often ends up in our water. Then consider those pesticides,which run off crops and also creep into our water; even small doses are sufficient to make billions of litres of water unsafe.
Myth 4: The water cycle and treatment systems mean we can use as much water as we want without any risk of running out of water any time soon.
Global water consumption is doubling every 20 years – that's more than twice the rate of human population growth. The Earth’s water is stored below ground in aquifers, which are being drained faster than they can replenish themselves, and the freshwater being pumped out of lakes and rivers is causing streams to run dry. The effects are already showing! Here in Canada, 26% of municipalities reported water shortages in the past decade!
In addition, because water must be heated, treated and circulated through our system, it isn’t just water that gets wasted as it goes down the drain. All these activities use energy, often in the form of burning fossil fuels. Chemicals used include chlorine, fluorine and caustic soda (not a synonym for ‘carbonated beverage’!). So conserving water also means reducing energy and chemical use!
Myth 5: Drinking bottled water is better for my health, so what’s the big deal anyway?
A recent study by the US Natural Resources Defense Council looked at 103 brands of bottled water and found that one-third of them actually contained contaminants—including synthetic chemicals, bacteria and arsenic at levels exceeding health guidelines (which are actually less strict for bottled water than they are for tap water!). Moreover, bottled water leaves behind 1.5 million tonnes of plastic annually, and emits thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide in the transportation of the bottled water to your town.
For running out of our most valuable resource at lightning speed, we're surely being wasteful with our water! Do we really need 343 litres of water daily? Why should anyone take more than what he needs? If brushing our teeth with the water running the whole time uses 10 litres, as opposed to doing the same using water only to rinse our mouth and the brush, wasting a tenth of that amount isn't the choice clear? Same thinking can be applied to taking a five-minute shower with a standard shower-head using (1,000L) versus same with a low-flow shower-head (35L) or a bath (60L) water.
It may be difficult to imagine in our world of plenty, a life in which every single drop of clean water is essential for basic survival. Could we each save one coffee or iced tea money a day to help bring clean water to everyone in the world?
I know in my heart that all of us, in our own small ways, are capable of contributing to the conservation of water – our fastest depleting and most precious life source.
It is both the least and the most proactive thing we owe to our children.
~~*~~~*~~
Sources
1. Cirque du Lake. http://www.cirquedulake.ca/
2. Water Can - Eau Vie http://www.watercan.com/newsroom/index.htm
3. From Junk to Funk. http://www.otesha.ca/otesha+book/index.en.html
~~*~~~*~~
Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © Will of my Own - 2011
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Comments
We all should be aware that corporations are buying up any land with headwaters, spring sources out here in the West...
We should also be aware of how much the hormones we use, estrogens, testosterones, progesterones, are poisoning our waters as well, changing the fish that live in these waters!
Thank you for this story and lesson
rated with love
HUGGGGGGGGGGGG
I am painfully aware - as most you must be - that at this time Somalia is suffering through a major draught and famine. The Canadian Government has already sent $800,000 through major help organizations to help millions of people on the brink of starvation.
Thanks for the spotlight on this. R
This is an excellent post, Fusun, and it certainly deserves the EP.
Lezlie
I'm not familiar with all the various print and online environmental publications -- and you'd think an environmental magazine might probably publish online to save paper :) -- but maybe consider pitching this article to some of those organizations, your article is very informative and they might consider publishing it for more people to read.
I was hoping not only to highlight Ryan Hreljac's devotion and success to this cause, but also to increase awareness about our most precious life source which is being depleted at an alarming rate, and to underscore the urgency in preserving the water supply for the future of our planet.
If the terroists wanted to jack America, poison the water supply in any big city in the southwest. It's a scary dry world we live in.
MOC
(r)
" It would cost only $14 billion US to provide clean water and sanitation for everyone in the world."
For the price of a dozen missiles or so we could provide clean water for everyone. Why do we good people of this world not demand that this become a reality? This post inspired me and I will donate to Ryan because it is a concrete action I can take and will. Thanks for the post and the consciousness that went into producing it.
Maude Barlow was in Cochabamba Bolivia for the alternative climate summit (to Copenhagen) last year. Perhaps you know the story, of how a company, owned by Halliburton, tried to privatize the water supply there (because the local coca-cola bottling plant needed a cheep supply of water; depending on where you begin and how you make the measurement it takes an average of 9 liters of water to produce 1 liter of coca-cola, and since they are using so much water anyway, in the process of manufacture, they then very kindly bottle some of it and sell it back to the locals! or ship it somewhere where they can earn five times the money, let's say to canadian joggers, for instance... healthy "mountain spring water from the Andes of South America!" Thankfully the locals of Cochabamba led a revolt and won back their water...
Naomi Klein annoys me at times (I'll admit) but she has been one of the voices leading the charge against the "tar sands" (an enormous water guzzler , among its many other unsavoury characteristics) and took a brave and principled stand in Copenhagen, exposing Canada as a major player, in terms of global climate change, with regard to the Alberta Tar Sands project.
And now look who is happily joining hands with all of this... ? Mr. Nobel Peace Prize himself, who is on the cusp of building a pipeline from Alberta to Texas to assure the continued exploitation of all the above said. Tar sands, nuclear energy, deep sea oil in the arctic... for them it's absolutely anything but...
...Ryan's way.
Saludos ~
I salute the Cochabamba natives for standing their ground and winning back their water from the unethical Coca Cola company.
Extracting the oil from oil sands uses massive amounts of energy and water, increasing the greenhouse gas emissions, threatening rivers and forests. Keystone XL, the pipeline which would bring Alberta oil to Texas Gulf Coast refineries to serve U.S. market, compounds the issue since pipeline leaks affect drinking water and sensitive ecosystems (as we've seen with the Exxon Valdez oil spill of '89). Keystone XL, (according to a report commissioned by the Obama administration), claims that it can reduce U.S oil dependency substantially from the Middle East, suggesting that the pipeline, combined with a reduction in overall U.S. oil demand, "could essentially eliminate Middle East crude imports longer term." There are too many 'IF's in this.
The Calgary-based TransCanada was blocked for a short term last June by the U.S. pipeline safety agency because of safety concerns. With Stephen Harper, newly re-elected Canadian Prime Minister, and an oil man himself who supports building the pipeline, resumption is a matter of time.
So, yes. All this, as you say is, “ absolutely anything but...
...Ryan's way.”
Thank you for your comments.
I am trying to convince my family to stop using bottled water. I use a Brita pitcher and we are about to buy a fridge with filtered water in the door. I just think about all those water bottles floating in the pacific. Makes me sick. I think we shoudl also move back to glass returnable soda (pop as we say here) bottles.
I have a friend on a Habitat mission in Africa right now, and of course things like drinkable water look completely different there. Eye-opening for those of us who take it for granted.
RR
"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983).
"A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."
I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling.
Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.
Author John Robbins provides these points and facts in his Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement.
U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as concentrated as raw domestic sewage.
Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.
The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water.
Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.
A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today.
According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.
Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."
--Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association
Nearly 75% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)
Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)
It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)
Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.
The following points and facts are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by the mother-daughter writing team of Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:
Factory farm pollution is the primary source of damage to coastal waters in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Scientists report that over sixty percent of the coastal waters in the United States are moderately to severely degraded from factory farm nutrient pollution. This pollution creates oxygen-depleted dead zones, which are huge areas of ocean devoid of aquatic life.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.
Thirty-three percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only two percent of our resources will go to the production of food.
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
--Jeremy Rifkin, pro-life AND pro-animal author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
According to the editors of World Watch, July/August 2004:
"The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future--deforestization, topsoil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease."
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, similarly says in the February 1995 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future (a peace and justice periodical on the religious Left):
"...the survival of our planet depends on our sense of belonging--to all other humans, to dolphins caught in dragnets to pigs and chickens and calves raised in animal concentration camps, to redwoods and rainforests, to kelp beds in our oceans, and to the ozone layer."
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only ten percent per year, it would free at least twelve million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed sixty million people.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is nearly 75 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is challenging those who think they can still be "meat-eating environmentalists" to go veg, if they really care about the planet.
peta2 is now the largest youth movement of any social change organization in the world.
peta2 has 267,000 friends on MySpace and 91,000 Facebook fans.
A few years ago, PETA was the top-ranked charity when a poll asked teenagers what nonprofit group they would most want to work for. PETA won by more than a two to one margin over the second place finisher, The American Red Cross, with more votes than the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity combined.
“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in an interview with PETA's Animal Times magazine from 2001, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do.
"It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”
Thank you for posting this. This is such an important issue and Ryan's story is very inspiring.
A very important post, Fusun. Thank you.
I have also seen various new water filters over the past few years that can help a rural village screen out dirt and micro-organisms and those devices gave me encouragement that more would be able to drink the surface water if they had no proper well available with clean water.
Water is an issue that will continue to be an important issue in the decades to come--whether it is water rights in the western U.S. or clean water in developing nations.
This planet is overwhelmingly supplied with water. Most of it is in a state that makes it undrinkable and not usable for growing standard crops. The problems involved in purifying water are concerned with the use of energy to remove the unwanted polluting chemicals. The energy that the Earth receives from the Sun each day is far in excess of anything humans need to perform whatever they require to exist. Humanity keeps patting itself on the back over its ingenuity and technological expertise. This is not even rocket science. Why the hell can't this assumedly clever species put two and two together to maintain an abundance of what they need from the readily available components?
Secondly, it apparently requires a hell of a lot of money to dig a well. Money for what? People dying for water have lots of free labor. What is required to dig a hole in the ground that desperate people cannot perform themselves? Admittedly there is technology involved determining where to dig and how to do it to get at what they need and making a secure water source but this is, I imagine, not information protected by high security. What are the problems preventing people desperate for water to get at it by themselves?
This is not any criticism of the people now involved in doing this good work but I sincerely wonder what the hell the big problem is.
I am not informed to comment on the first part of comments, although the points you raised arouse my curiousity as well.
For the second part, perhaps the links included in the piece may answer your question "What is required to dig a hole in the ground that desperate people cannot perform themselves?".
I the found a message at their link for WaterCan by Gary H.J. Pluim, their Executive Director. What I understood is that the challenge is not just about building a well but also about creating a sustainable development which includes ". . .drilling a well, building a latrine, and teaching the importance and lifesaving value of personal hygiene; it is about the project – fresh, clean water – still flowing ten or twenty years from now."
I don't know if desperate, poor and thirsty people could initiate and accomplish all of that without assistance. Would that justify the cost for you?
Thank you for reading and commenting. I appreciate your visits.
Bernadine:
We're singing the same tune. Enjoy your water-friendly refrigerator. I would like to get back to glass milk bottles as well as soda bottles. Thanks for dropping by.
designanator:
Thank you for your comments and for doing the right things towards water conservation. As you affirm, water " will continue to be an important issue in the decades to come..." Very much so!
Kate, Mary-Ann, Jali, Hopeful Starving Student:
Thank you all, for your comments and reading this post.
Vasu Murti:
Thank you for your very informative and long reply. It could have been a post on its own and maybe viewed on a larger scale rather than being hidden here. I appreciate your effort and generosity. With appreciation.
We just got back from Aruba were they have one of the world's most advanced desalination plants. It was tasty too!
R