Water

It is surprising how often we use water in our day to day lives. We use it to cook, to wash, for hygienic purposes, to farm, to do laundry - almost everything we do requires the use of water. Most of us in the developed world don’t realize the full value of this resource and just how much we need it because we have always had it in abundance. An astonishing and rather sad stat I came across is that “approximately 3.575 million people die each year from water-related diseases.” This really got me thinking, because here in North America, we use water without even considering whether it is safe for us to use or not; clean water is all we have ever known. We simply expect the faucet to release clear, clean water with one turn of the tap, continuing to flow until we turn the tap again. We control our use of water, and can pretty much have it as soon as we desire it.

Think about this, the water in our toilets – water we use to flush our waste – is cleaner than what some people living in slums use as drinking water. I feel a little sick when I think about this disparity. No man, child, or mother should have to die from a basic necessity that humankind requires to live and that should be shared amongst the entire population of our planet – clean water should be considered a human right not a commodity. What really irks me is that most slum communities lack ACCESS to sanitary water. What does that even mean? Pretty much that countries have the water available but something comes in the way of the people who desire to use it. According to Water.org, “people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city.” This is primarily because of the privatization of the resource, making it unaffordable to some people. This brings us back to the question of whether water should be considered as a commodity or a human right. There is also the contemplation of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, or earthquakes that can potentially worsen the water quality in a region. This was a devastating consequence of the Indonesian Tsunami of 2004. What can one do under these circumstances?

My friend Moin gave me this link to watch a few days ago (Thanks Moin): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXepkIWPhFQ. A man named Michael Pritchard invented a machine, Lifesaver, which sterilizes contaminated water so that it is safe to drink. He uses science to explain the technology. Basically, the smallest virus and bacteria are 200 nanometres and 25 nanometres respectively, and the pump has pores that are 15 nanometres big, barricading any unwanted parasites from getting through. This idea suggests that instead of shipping sterile water from developed countries as a form of aid, we should just use the water Mother Nature provides and make it sterile with Lifesaver. It costs about 5 cents per day to run, and Canada spends billions of dollars on foreign aid, most of it ineffective anyway due to the outdated approach of utilizing that aid.

With 8 billion dollars invested into this technology, the Sub goal of the 7^th Millennium Development Goal of halving the population without sufficient access to safe drinking water by 2015 can be met. I truly believe that good utilization of foreign aid is investing in simple technologies such as Lifesaver because the public can learn to use these technologies themselves. They can sterilize and use water resources available nearby, instead of traveling far distances or paying unrealistic amounts of money. Once access to safe drinking water, a basic requirement for survival, is no longer a concern for poor communities, they can focus on bettering their quality of life through education, health care, and income generation. Water is fundamental for life, it should be considered a human right, and therefore should be shared by all of the planet’s inhabitants.


-Madiha