Do you know what a leading cause of preventable blindness is? It’s a lack of clean water! There is a contagious infection called trachoma, which many of us have never heard of. It mainly occurs where people live in overcrowded conditions with limited access to clean water and health care. Caused by a bacteria, trachoma spreads rapidly in communities where people don’t have enough clean water to wash their hands and faces regularly. Washing with as little as 1 quart (4 cups) of clean water each day can prevent the disease. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, 6 million people world wide are blind due to trachoma and more than 150 million people are in need of treatment. Infection usually first occurs in childhood, but people do not become blind until adulthood.
“It’s easy to tell people, ‘You need to wash yourselves and your children regularly to prevent trachoma.’” Says Aboubakar Maman, a World Vision program manager based in Niger,West Africa. “But how can they do this when they only have one pail of water a day for the whole family? They are forced to choose between drinking and washing.”
In alignment with VSP’s mission around eye care, the VSP employees raised $11,500 and teamed up with charity:water to fund a water project and improve the health conditions in a country where drinking water was difficult to obtain. Our project is now “well” underway, with two wells currently under construction in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia. In a few short months we will have improved the daily lives of hundreds of people and provided enough clean water so that they won’t be forced to make that difficult decision between drinking to stay alive and blindness.
Other Water Facts:
- Right now, almost 1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That is 1 in every 8 people.
- Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80 percent of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms violence, including war.
- Children are especially vulnerable with 90 percent of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions being children under 5 years old.
