Safe water is a blessing
It is only on camping holidays that I have experienced anything different. Then it was fun to collect water, because doing so was a novelty. One memorable holiday in Scotland in my childhood involved climbing down a steep path to a freshwater spring and then scrambling back up the hill to the field where we were camping. Apart from the midges, it was fun.
One week of that in fine weather was OK. We were camping in a crofter's field. The crofter was an elderly widow who lived alone, managing the croft without help, except at hay-making. She collected her water like that every day of the year, summer and winter. The water was said to be safe to drink but my mother insisted on boiling it before we consumed any.
According to Christian Aid's 'Count Your Blessings' Lent calendar 884 million people in the developing world use unsafe drinking water sources. The United Nations passed a resolution on 28 July 2010 declaring that access to clean drinking water and sanitation was a fundamental human right, but there's a long way to go before this need is universally met.
Christian Aid is involved in many water projects around the world. Just one example is the Ethiopa Water Action Project. Today the 'Count Your Blessings' calendar suggest giving 50p if you have always lived in a property with running water.
In a word, No, Nancy. From the age of 6 I lived in a cottage with no running water where every drop had to be carried from the spring. We didn't get mains water until I was in my early teens. Now we live in a house with its own water supply. The old well would run dry when there wasn't enough rain, but thankfully the newer one has never let us down. We have never boiled our water in either situation, but of course the circumstances are very different from the polluted rivers and stagnant ponds which cause so much disease elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interesting comment Perpetua. What a change that must have been for you in your early teens.
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