Even now, even in the days of election and revolution and taking to the streets and signing petitions and making out like Facebook isn’t just a waste of time for self-involved cack blabbers, life must go on. It’s time for the Charity of the Month. It’s time for WaterAid.
WaterAid is highly focused, specialising in improving people’s access to water, sanitation and improved hygiene while reducing use of the spacebar. It estimates since 1981 it’s brought safe water to 13.4 million people thanks to new wells and pipelines, improved sanitation for 8.1 million people thanks to latrines and hygiene education and helped ease the thumbs of 3,000 typists thanks to its punctuation-lite name.
Let’s look at its work in Malawi. In the past decade WaterAid hasbuilt thousandsof latrines and hundreds of wells. Just one of its pipe laying schemes in the Machinga District has brought clean water to 15,000 people. Their wells in the Salima District have brought clean water to 26,000 people. That’s good stuff when unclean water brings cholera and typhoid, when life expectancy is 52, when every year almost 12,000 children under the age of five die from diarrhoea.
My payday cash dump could buy six bags of cement for building latrines in Ghana, pay for a mason to protect a spring in Uganda or for a day’s hygiene education in Tanzania. That’s money well spent.
Donate here. Then donate to the fund for redundant spacebar manufacturers. The industry is struggling. They’ve been picketing for two long years now and another hard winter is just around the corner.
Photo credit: WaterAid
