I’m sitting at my desk researching about my new venture… building a well in Kenya, Africa. Midway through I get a little thirsty (reading about all this water and all) so I simply walk myself downstairs to my kitchen, pull out my nice little Britta pitcher and poor myself a glass of clean, sanitary and safe water. It’s cold, refreshing and it took me about 30 seconds to have it right there in front of me, at my fingertips, ready to drink. Pretty humbled as I walked myself back up to my desk and continued reading about the crisis… let me say it again… CRISIS in Kenya.
When I decided this past December to support Living Water through my business (you can read about it in my previous blog update here), I really didn’t know much about the water crisis at all. After I started my research, my heart breaks for the conditions of thousands of villages around the world that don’t have access to clean drinking water. It not only causes 90% of all diseases in the world and claims the lives of 5,000 children under the age of 5 every day, but it’s also the very thing that keeps them trapped in their poverty. “Time Poverty” is the term they use… not because they don’t have the ability, opportunity, or desire to make a better life for themselves, but because 40 billion hours of labor are wasted each year because they’re forced to spend the majority of their day walking to places where they can get clean water. At the very bottom of this post is a graph showing the importance of clean water. The image is used with permission from Living Water International.
But yes, my endeavor…. building a well!! Through Jamie Grant Photography every purchase made, session contracted, wedding booked, and print ordered – a portion of the proceeds will go towards building this well! At the end of 2011… the hope is to have an entire well dug and a whole village positively affectively by the clean water they will be able to access by this well.
One of the other exciting things about this well-building mission, is that my fans can follow along with me every step of the way. As we continue to strive to meet this goal, continual progress updates can be found here! Currently (as you’ll see when you click on the link) the well is 19% completed!! I’ll be continually updating this page so be sure to follow along as we build. I’m pretty pumped to know that my small little passion here in the middle of central Illinois can affect hundreds of lives on the complete opposite side of the world. Meanwhile, check out this graph which depicts how essential clean water is for development!
