Water
Angel, Elizabeth, and Sylvia are a triple force for hygiene promotion at their school in Blantyre, Malawi. The girls are triplets, and they’re all in the school sanitation club. “Water is important because it helps us keep our bodies healthy,”
Combine baking soda, oil, and extract from a local Malawian tree, and it equals better hygiene for an entire community.
On any given day, as she sees her kids off to school or prepares food for her family, Maureen could get a call from a community in her region. She’d drop everything in that moment, grab her tools, and head off on her bicycle.
Every day at 7 am, Cementi Mendozo opens his grocery store in a local trading center in Chikwawa District, Malawi.
“Okay, let me give you an example of why water and sanitation in schools are important.” David’s excitement is palpable. He’s a member of the Chilomoni Primary School’s Sanitation Club in Blantyre, Malawi.
At Water For People, we pay careful attention to the numbers behind our work – because data shows us the impact and illuminates our next steps.
“It was like a dream to us,” says Lilian. She says the people in her community never thought they would have safe water. “We used to wake up very early in the morning to go fetch water,” Lilian says. She and others in her community in Gicumbi District, Rwanda would lose hours each day walking to fetch water for the day’s tasks.
Peter and his five children are waiting on safe water. “We wake up in the morning around four o’clock, because the first thing we do as the whole family is collect water,” Peter explains. “We have to use flashlights so that we can see the way.”
Sweetly sleeping, two-year-old Solange lays contentedly in her mom’s arms. Marie Louise’s other children are at school. This scene, almost serene, feels very different from what Marie Louise says life looked like a few years ago. A few years ago, her village didn’t have a safe water source.
Beatrice and her neighbors have an acute understanding of the value of time. Three years ago, women and children in her community of Ngoma in Rulindo District, Rwanda, were losing hours every day fetching water from an unprotected spring.
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