A young women collects dirty water at her traditional water source. This photo was taken during a recent Ethiopia Water Tour, where Water 1st supporters journeyed to sites where Water 1st is implementing water projects. The community of Ilamu Muja will soon have safe drinking water, thanks to your generous donations.
Greetings WaterLoggers –
We’ve just reorganized and refreshed the ‘News’ and ‘Get Involved’ sections of the Water1st.org website. The goal is to help you all find things more efficiently, and to inspire you to spend more time learning about how you can get involved with Water 1st.
The ‘Get Involved’ section received the most attention. We’ve divided the pages into four categories: Youth, Business, Religious/Civic Groups, and Individuals. Diving deeper into any one of those sections will show you many ways to get involved, as well as plenty of examples of other groups and individuals who are already engaged in supporting Water 1st.
Both ‘News’ and ‘Get Involved’ received a new streamlined look for their cover pages.
We hope you enjoy the new design and structure. Please leave your comments - pro or con - and suggestions.
Thanks,
Chris
NPR ran a five-part series this week on the Ganges. The last piece in the series was entitled, “Where the Ganga Meets the Sea” and is close to the area where Water 1st is supporting projects. Our projects are a little further south.
Click here to listen to the story on NPR’s website.
In a poll carried out by the British Medical Journal in January 2007, sanitation was voted the most important medical milestone since 1840, ranking higher than antibiotics and vaccines. In poor countries, over 2.5 billion people do not have access to a basic toilet. Lack of access to safe water and latrines causes 5 million deaths each year.
Water and sanitation targets are included in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Governments have pledged to halve the proportion of people in need of clean water and basic sanitation by 2015. However, at current funding levels, under-funding for sanitation means the sanitation MDG is 90 years off target and will not be met until 2105. The cost of missing this goal: 133 million lives.
Save the Date for the 2nd Annual Water 1st - Beer 2nd event on Saturday, April 7, 2007, at Hale’s Paladium, Seattle. Serving water first, and beer (or root beer) second! Come on out for this fun(d)raiser. Enjoy live music, food, dancing, and a Water 1st presentation. Click here for more information.
Invite your friends and let us know your favorite things about last year’s Water 1st Beer 2nd event.
This piece ran in November. I think it is very well written and researched by the author, Clay Holtzman. There is one story about Water 1st and the global water crisis, and then a side-bar story about my background. My son, Calvin, thinks he is famous now that he has seen his name printed in a newspaper. Just wait until he sees it on this blog!
Water 1st makes grants to groups that help themselves
Let me know what you think of the stories!
Marla
Welcome to our very first blog. As a growing organization, it’s important to us to maintain contact with our supporters and connect you with the people and communities that benefit from your support. In addition to our website, films and newsletters, we thought a “water log” would be another way for us to stay connected.
The global water crisis is in the news a lot these days, especially since the development of the Millennium Development Goals. Almost daily, I receive an email about different news articles, some of which we’d like to share with you and have a conversation about.
When we travel to our projects, there’s always a lot of information to share - more than we can possibly put into our newsletters or films. Now that we have high speed internet access in the countries where we work, we’d like to use that to talk with you from the field and answer your questions while we are actually visiting our partners and projects.
This is the first time I’ve blogged, so I’m new to this, but I’m excited to have this format to talk with you about our work. One of my favorite things to do is talk to small groups (like our Water 1st Thursday events) about our work and answer questions ranging from the diameter of PVC pipe used in our Honduras projects to how our partners coordinate with local government in Bangladesh. So, I hope that we can have these kinds of exchanges online, and I’ll learn more about blogging as we go.
We hope you will participate in the conversation. I can’t wait to hear from you.
Marla