A Cause with a Right to no Compromise….
Going beyond borders, is what should be the mission. This has been a vision long enough with more ways to get waylaid, more reasons to transgress, more wants to engulf, more tantrums to defer…. all from visions that could have, would have, should have been pursued for the greater good, but then whose looking with a mission, anybody? If yes, then twist and shout!
Speaking of “Walls” can’t but help thinking of a man and his mission at raising one, way above normal intelligence, above more pressing needs, above deliberate provocation, above? …. above…? A Border Wall? And what do you see? In many countries, its clear skies but no clear safe water. Now this is a serious mission and vision to pursue and how! We need “Water Walls”, ones that flow incessantly, ones we can link to other flows, ones that make codependency effortless when drinking for survival. We die, instead. Oops! Water, in my country is unsafe, impure, stagnant, contaminated…….so, then why is it hard to understand that both the cause and effect of our waters is to flow to kill, to die, to flood….
” Oh Ganga tu, Oh Ganga tu, Oh Ganga, behati ho kyun”?
There are insurmountable challenges to the cause and campaign for clean safe drinking water in our world. It is my cause, my “Wall” to overcome in the smallest way, even if it is to only make it a unretractable commitment. What next then? Rather, for who can I campaign this cause for a right that is theirs, mine, ours and yours? I’m picking this one for our children! Children are the most susceptible to illness. An excerpt from a study here says, “Sanitation and water-related diseases account for up to twenty-five per cent of all deaths of children under the age of five; thus, every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water. Diarrhea, the cause of the majority of these deaths, is responsible for more deaths than HIV, TB, or malaria. The World Health Organization has estimated that “88 per cent of diarrheal disease is caused by unsafe water and sanitation.
So, to the children I say, “Listen up! Here are some words and phrases you must know today to understand why you can be dead tomorrow. Ready?
(information in the above gathered from a paper and study fromNorthwestern Journal of International Human Rights)
While our children grow around this tragedy with knowledge as acidic as the arsenic in the waters, my campaign for this cause seeps deeper into the rights we have over it and the inheritance bestowed, is best not owned given the underestimates of what inadequate supplies, inadequate accessibility and inadequate quality bring to our waters that continue to hamper growth and lives. The “Water Wall” is my vision to stop the contaminated flow, to increase the flow in all its glory where its needed most, to our children and women in poverty and low-income rural homes, where death by water is not scarce!
World bodies recognize human right to safe clean water. Governments trade and post the promise of delivery to stay, to win; Covenants and declarations on water accessibility hold nations to gather and unite their peoples, but can you post a price to a bare necessity, a natural resource, only second to the air we breathe? The saying “Water is priceless……for everything else there’s Mastercard!” is no longer the case! …. The Saints then came marching in!
Rightly so, these guardian angels of clean safe water have taken the industry to over a trillion dollars today, but this only because it has become necessary. Unconditionally, as a matter of fact. I talked to a few, fromWaterHealth International to Water Aid and other NGO angels striving to conquer and provide for a clean safe water environment, helping communities to sustain and fight industrial pollution. Today we pay a small price to stay alive! My “Water Wall” has now an entrance gate through which, I can drink this nectar of life free of fear and death……I will survive and not be petrified! Our women will teach our children to save, to budget, to put away for every day,
A little in thought and deed, to get this elixir water, to cure, to treat,
To nurture, to greet
The future and help realize the need
To preserve, to save, to honor, to heed
A bare necessity, a simple bare necessity
That should be safe, pure and free!
In my quest for the cause and campaign, I learnt from these ‘Guardians’ the absolute need to bring these staggering numbers of illness and death caused by contaminated water, to lessen by the hour. That to work, to build, to purify, to create, to distribute, to generate livelihoods around and within the scope of “Water Walls”, takes a mighty vision and a systems mission to provide for people, our children here today and then tomorrow and as they multiply. This has a cost to it and its imperative that the training, education and creating the habit to contribute to its sustainability, its intractable commitment that it requires, is put in motion. In a recent meeting, with members of ‘WaterHealth International’, India & USA, I found a place where I felt hope, hope being a feeling here, a feeling that these guardians of safe clean water will safeguard my ‘Water Walls’ and I need, we need, such partners to walk alongside, with the accountability they offer. So, where then are the next steps for me? For you? For us?
From extreme poverty in countries like Africa, India, South America to one in five in the US that drink on “untreated water”, we must drive dignity from the human rights that we have as a people and own these rights as we do and atop of the hierarchy for A RIGHT CAUSE, are the gates of these protected ‘Water Walls ‘ that I must fight for , as you must. The appropriate question then is “What must I do NOW?” Everything I was taught not to, if necessary…., steal, beg, borrow to sustain dignity, to build a ‘Water Wall’, watersheds, water wells deep in the lands most forgotten and left to die and so I must do it NOW!
S T Coleridge’s poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had a famous line that says, “water! water! everywhere, but not a drop to drink!” ……reference was to the salty seas. Imagine, if it were for safe clean drinking water and no more available to the world? Can you?
Author:
SEEMA AZHARUDDIN
Senior Consultant, Leadership &Communication, Actor, Producer, Activist & Journalist, Writer, Orator –
An Empowered Woman in quest for needed causes and campaigns