If you follow me on Twitter or are my friend on Facebook (or in real life!), you know that I spent a couple of days last week without running water. I was able to use buckets of water from the creek behind my house to water the animals and flush the toilet. I bought a couple of gallons of drinking water at the grocery store and just didn't take a shower for about a day and a half. Had the "drought" gone on a little longer I would have been able to shower across the street at my neighbor's house.
I never realized how much I use water throughout the day. Obviously my morning cup of tea and oatmeal use water, as does toilet flushing, showering and dish washing. When only facing a day or two without water, they're pretty manageable. I found myself constantly turning on the useless taps for all sorts of other little things that I normally don't even think about.
There's nothing like doing without running water for awhile to make you appreciate it. We know that good hygiene is vitally important in stopping the spread of disease. When you can't just turn on the tap, that becomes problematic. Do you wash your hands in creek water and risk cross contamination? Do you use your precious drinking water? I put a bottle of Purell out and didn't worry about it. What if you didn't have that choice?
What for me was a minor inconvenience, quickly solved when the plumbers showed up is a daily fact of life for millions of people around the world. In fact, according to Charity:Water almost a billion people on the planet don't have access to clean drinking water. That's one in every eight people. Charity:Water is one of my favorite charities. Private donations pay for all of their administrative costs so 100% of donations go towards providing access to clean water for people in developing nations. The first thing I did when my water came back on was to make a donation to Charity:Water in honor (!) (memory?) of my water-less couple of days.
I'm thankful for my little reminder to conserve and cherish my access to clean drinking water, magically delivered at the turn of a tap.
I've got a giveaway going on this week! Read about it here!
In order to get an entry in the giveaway, comment on this and any post running on SimplyForties this week. One comment per person per post will count. So if you comment on every post this week you would get six entries in the giveaway. If you Tweet about the giveaway (being sure to include @SimplyForties in your Tweet so I will be sure and get it) I’ll give you another entry, for a possible seven entries. I’ll use a random number drawing on Saturday, January 16th and your prize will be shipped directly from Striking. Be sure to use a valid email address when you comment so I will be able to get in touch with you.
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3 comments:
It's so easy to take water for granted until you don't have it. I always keep about a dozen 2 gallon jugs of it in the basement for when the power goes out, which it does fairly often here in PEI.
running water and electricity.....amazing things aren't they? ;) glad you have you water back
Ha, no kidding. Tall Slow Talkin' Texan had a water pipe break on Christmas Eve at 4:30 pm. Of course. He had to turn it off at the street to prevent gallons of water being wasted. For the rest of the holiday weekend, he had to go out in 30 degree weather to turn it on every time we wanted running water. Notice I said 'he' had to go out :)
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