H2O for Life update

H2O for Life has been busy attending educational conferences in the past few weeks. At the National Youth Leadership Council’s conference for Service Learning in San Jose, CA, H2O for Life participated in 5 engaging break- out sessions, and were instrumental in bringing “The Lost Boys of Sudan” to the podium as keynote speakers.
We’d like to thank Waunakee Middle School from WI, and Centennial High School from MN for participating in our first video-conferencing experience. It was great fun to hear from all the students while sitting in San Jose, CA. We also participated in our first Webinar and hope to do more presentations via computer in the future. You can tune in!
Phillipe Cousteau from Earth Echo, Lee Lysne from the Kind World Foundation, S.K. Duffs service learning specialist from Hoboken, Emily Crossette, student from Abington HS and Patty Hall, from H2O for Life spoke on a Thought Leaders Panel about the issues surrounding water. There were many interesting comments!

Last week, H2O for Life attended the National Catholic Education Conference in Minneapolis, MN. We were joined by teacher Mary Burke and Principal Judi Halli from Holy Spirit School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The ladies were articulate and highly entertaining as they enthralled the crowd with stories from their project experiences this past year. (The God Squad, Denim for Digging etc.)

The school year is heading to a close. Remember to organize your events, and help fund your partner school project!

World Water Day

H2O for Life attended and was among the speakers to address the assembly at the World Water Day Event held in DC on March 22.

US Secretary of State Joins High-level Coalition to Mark World Water Day and Stress Urgency of Ensuring Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries Coalition of nearly 30 organizations from the public and private sectors, including foundations and faith leaders, announce unprecedented call for action to raise awareness and spur stronger commitments to address the global water crisis.

Washington, DC—Today is World Water Day and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joined Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, former US Ambassador to the Organization of American States Hattie Babbitt, National Geographic Society Chairman Gil Grosvenor, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator and Global Water Challenge Chairman Bill Reilly and other key private-sector, foundation, faith and nongovernmental organization leaders along with Kenna, the Grammy-nominated artist behind Summit on the Summit, to call for immediate action to ensure access to safe, clean water and improved sanitation in the developing world. They convened at “Uniting for Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation,” an event at the National Geographic Society, which kicked off two days of World Water Day activities in Washington, DC.

At a time when one in six people worldwide does not have access to safe drinking water and two in five people lack access to basic sanitation, the water crisis is among the most pressing issues the global community faces—affecting health, child survival, gender equity, education, the environment, poverty and political security. While many factors—climate change, geography, poor water systems, lack of infrastructure and failed policies—have contributed, the fact remains that billions of people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. “In an era of increasing scarcity, ensuring access to safe drinking water and sanitation for the world’s poor is critical,” said US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global AffairsMaria Otero. “We must understand water’s implications for food security, peace and conflict, particularly in regions of increasing shortage.”

Today, the impact of the global water crisis can be seen most clearly in the women and children of the developing world. Children are the most susceptible to water, sanitation and hygiene-related illness, which factors into nearly all of the major causes of child death, including diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition. Beyond the health impact, women and young girls often bear the economic and educational costs, since they are most likely to spend their time collecting and transporting water for their families. Millions of school-age children are also affected, as more than one-half of all primary schools in developing countries do not provide safe water and nearly two-thirds lack basic sanitation.

“We cannot wait to improve access to water and sanitary conditions for future generations,” said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Goodwill Ambassador for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Africa, in a video address. “Water and sanitation are fundamental to overall human development and both play a critical role in achieving all eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Safe water and sanitation improve health, advance education, reduce poverty and drive economic growth.”“Water is the most pressing issue of our time,” said Gil Grosvenor, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Geographic Society. “It’s time we do something about it with solutions available today.”

In addition to the US government’s efforts, Ed Cain, Vice President of Grant Programs at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and ONE DROP, announced new commitments to water and sanitation at the National Geographic event co-hosted by Water Advocates and the National Geographic Society. The event is to be followed by a series of high-level roundtable discussions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. They aim to generate strategies to improve water, sanitation and hygiene programs and to increase capacity to address global challenges.

To mark World Water Day 2010, a diverse coalition of nearly 30 US-based organizations came together in two days of activities to raise awareness and call for stronger commitments and more robust action to ensure universal access to safe water and sanitation everywhere they are needed."I have seen first-hand the debilitating issue of the global clean water crisis. The statistics are obvious. Water is interconnected with every major issue that the world faces. It should be the number one focus of everything we do,” said Kenna, musician and philanthropist. “My father almost fell victim to the water crisis when he was born without clean water being available in Ethiopia. If he had died, then I wouldn't be here." Today’s activities will be followed by World Water Advocacy Day on Tuesday, March 23. Advocates from across the country will come together to call on Congress to increase support for sustainable water, sanitation, hygiene and child health programs. Senator John Kerry, Representative Jim McGovern and Mandy Moore, PSI Ambassador, singer-songwriter and actress, will join the effort. The day will include a Congressional briefing, “The Ripple Effect of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene on Global Health and Development,” lead by experts including Alexandra Cousteau, board member, Global Water Challenge; Dr. Greg Allgood, director, Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program, P&G; Dr. Merri Weinger, program manager, Hygiene Improvement, USAID Bureau for Global Heath; Dr. Koki Agarwal, director, Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program, Jhpiego; and Dr. Eric Mintz, team lead, Global WASH Epidemiology, Waterborne Diseases Prevention Branch, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It will be followed by an attempt to form the world’s longest toilet queue—part of a global effort to raise awareness around the need for safe water and improved sanitation.

World Water Day

World Water Day is March 22. H2O for Life is invited to Washington DC to speak at a World Water Day event being held at the National Geographic Auditorium, sponsored by Water Advocates. Co-founders Patty Hall and Val Johnson will share the stage with high school senior, Emily Crossette. Emily has been an integral part of the H2O for Life group at Abington High School, PA for the past three years. Emily is also on the H2O for Life student advisory board. She is thrilled to be speaking about her history with H2O for Life. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will also be speaking- We are among great company! Support World Water Day- Do something to make a “splash” on WWD.

The American School in London

Below is a summary of what we, The American School in London, have been doing to raise money. It was written by a grade 6 student. This is a picture of the bulletin board where the students wrote down what they did to conserve water.

"Grade six has been saving water for the past two months to raise money for a school in India. We have saved water in many ways including: shortening showers, saving our toilet flushes and turning off the water when brushing our teeth. We recorded all our water savings on charts. We have been doing this to raise money for the Jasola village school, a girl’s school, who don’t have clean water or bathrooms. For every liter we saved we would donate a little money (about a pound) and put it in a water jug. Our plan is to put pipes into the school, which will carry clean water and plumbing so the school can be a better place. In flex class we are studying different problems with water such as water borne disease and water shortages. In our groups we will create public service announcements on our water issues to present at an assembly."

Check out more stories and become a "fan" on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/#!/h2oforlife?ref=mf

Students perform at MLK/Water for Haiti Performance

Hoboken Charter School- water for Haiti/MLK day

The article below recently appeared in the "Hoboken Patch" newspaper. Mr. S.K. Duff, a teacher at Hoboken Charter School is no stranger to H2O for Life. He and his school have participated for the past 2 years with H2O for Life, raising funds for a school in Kenya last year, and have recently completed fund-raising for a school in Uganda. Hoboken School under the leadership of Mr. Duff, the rest of the wonderful staff, and students takes service learning seriously. They strive to make a difference in many ways in their local community and their global world. Many schools around the country are "digging deep for water" for Haiti, and are also continuing to support chosen projects for other schools in need of water supported by H2O for Life. There is much to be done, but together we can all make our world a wonderful place for EVERYONE!
Please support the efforts in Haiti, but don't lose sight of the fact that there are many schools around the world desperate for water. You can help be the solution!


Editor Claire Moses: clairem@patch.com


Hoboken Community Gathers for MLK Celebration

The event was organized by the Hoboken Charter School, but involved many organizations in the community
By Claire Moses


The students of the Mustard Seed School perform during Monday's celebration of Martin Luther King Day in Hoboken.

All Saints Episcopal Church was jam packed yesterday, as the Hoboken Community celebrated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King during its annual Sing Out For Justice concert.
Hundreds of parents and involved community members attended to listen to the children of the Mustard Seed School, Hoboken Charter School and individual performers.

"We're embracing the diversity of the community in honor of Martin Luther King," said
S.K. Duff, director of service learning at the Hoboken Charter School.
All the proceeds — Starbucks coffee, coffee cake and cookies, and cover charge — went to relief efforts for Haiti. Around 6 p.m. last night, more than $700 was raised.

"This year has a special meaning," said Hoboken Charter High School Principal Ria Grosvenor, "reiterated by the tragedy in Haiti."

Those who attended the concert, which started promptly at 4 p.m. and lasted more than two hours, said this one was the most energetic one to date.
On Friday Hoboken Charter School organized the annual Martin Luther King Day march on Washington Street. This concert formed as the crown on the school's efforts to educate its students on civil rights, community service and diversity, said Duff.
Duff delivered a speech, students from the Mustard Seed School joined in with students from Hoboken Charter School and performed the entrance procession, singing "Sweet Chariot."
Other songs performed were "A Change is Gonna Come," "Heavenly Day," and "I Shall Be Released."

On the sides of the church, which was too crowded to move around in, were tables showcasing the students' work and tables where kids could do activities.

Councilman-at-Large David Mello attended with his wife and daughter.
"I just thought I'd check it out," he said. "It's great."
Members of the Hoboken clergy were also in attendance. Rabbi Robert Scheinberg of the United Hoboken Synagogue stopped by, as well as Reverend Geoffrey Curtiss, president of the All Saints Community and Service Development Corporation.

The constant buzz of playing kids and chatting parents did not make most forget the reason why they came to the event — to celebrate civil rights and a diverse community.
"It's a nice way to celebrate what Dr. Martin Luther King stood for on a complete community level," prinicpal Grosvenor said.

H2O for Life is proud to partner with Mr. David Kuria. David has devised a new system for "toilets". We are working to fund his system "Iko toilets" for 10 schools located in Kenya. Rotary International is supportive of this project. If your school, or Rotary club would like to get involved and help make this happen, please contact H2O for Life. The story below tells of the sanitation crisis, and what we need to do to help save lives. Changing sanitation in schools makes a huge difference in the lives of children.


Nowhere to go
by Rose George The Rotarian -- January 2010


I n the bustling main street at the entrance to Shanti Nagar, off Mumbai’s western expressway, men in suits go about their business. Women carry containers, hurrying to fill them in the two hours that water comes through the taps.
The shopkeepers and doctors and quacks and barbers do a brisk trade. It looks and sounds like any Indian street – only narrower and darker – and looking in, perhaps you wonder what makes Shanti Nagar a slum. So you turn around and see, on the dusty roadside, as the cars zoom past, a series of little children’s bottoms, perched nakedly and shamelessly in public, defecating with composure. After the children jump up and scamper down the embankment, disappearing back into the slum, you notice that the roadside is dotted with feces, as far down as you can see.

The 4,000 people who live in Shanti Nagar share one community toilet block, with 26 stalls. You’ll have to ask directions if you want to see it, because smell is no guide when the whole place stinks, and when you can easily be lost down the dim passageways, where you stumble clumsily and where kind hands occasionally reach out to guide your head away from an overhanging tin roof, or to move you out of the way of a pile of filth. Shanti Nagar is definitely a slum, because to live in a slum is to live among excrement, and this place has plenty of it.
This may be horrifying, but it is not extreme. In fact, Shanti Nagar’s appalling sanitation is normal. It must be, when 2.6 billion of the world’s people have no sanitation facilities whatsoever, not even a bucket or a box. If they’re lucky, as in slums such as Kibera, Kenya, they might have a plastic bag to defecate into, which they then tie and throw (hence the nickname “helicopter toilets”). That’s a luxury. But 4 in 10 of the planet’s people have no private or hygienic facilities to do their business in.

Driving through the Indian countryside at dusk – through settlements with decent enough houses, functioning shops, and cell phone kiosks everywhere – you can see, on leaving a village, people squatting on the side of the road, clasping a lota (water vessel) with which to cleanse themselves. Elderly women try to hold their saris over their private parts while simultaneously covering their faces. “Ten years ago,” says Indian sanitation activist Joe Madiath, “she would have jumped up at every passing car. Now there are too many. She can’t be up and down like a yo-yo.”

Weapon of mass destruction
Why does it matter? It’s not simply a dereliction of dignity. Human waste is a highly efficient weapon of mass destruction. Feces can carry 50 communicable diseases, including cholera, hepatitis, and schistosomiasis. Where people have poor or no sanitation, human excrement gets tramped into living environments on people’s feet and carried in on fingers. It finds its way into food and drink, with desperate consequences. Diarrhea – 90 percent of which is caused by contaminated food or water – kills up to two million people a year, most of them children. It kills more children under five than AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. In graphic terms, diarrhea’s death toll is equivalent to two jumbo jets full of children dying every four hours, or one child every 15 seconds. Several have died in the time it has taken you to read this far. Read that sentence again, and there’s another one gone.

Diarrhea is the reason you can find a malnourished child in a well-fed family. Feed a child a high-protein biscuit by all means, but it will be of little use if she can’t keep it in. Diarrhea also affects vaccination efforts. Polio immunization workers sometimes need to administer the oral vaccine 10 times instead of once, because diarrhea washes it straight out again, or because a child’s immune system is already overwhelmed with fighting the pathogens in unsanitary environments. Nor is that all. Respiratory tract infections, the No. 1 killer of children, are also linked to poor sanitation, as they can be spread by unwashed hands.
The breadth and depth of the destruction caused by poor sanitation is stunning, but no more so than the way sanitation continues to be neglected, by donors and by politicians. Almost 90 percent of water and sanitation budgets in developing countries goes to providing clean water, even though a good latrine reduces diarrhea by 36 percent (clean water only reduces it by 20 percent).

Poor sanitation is linked to a quarter of all child deaths, but money still flows more readily to more fashionable diseases and causes. In Madagascar, less than 0.1 percent of the population is estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS, and in 2007, UNAIDS found that there were too few AIDS deaths to estimate. Yet HIV/AIDS receives five times more funding there than sanitation, though diarrhea kills 14,000 Madagascan children every year.

There are all sorts of reasons sanitation continues to be treated like dirt. Nobody protests about it, for a start. Not even in great cities such as London, where 40 percent of public toilets have closed in the last decade, or New York, where it’s an achievement to find a toilet without having to buy a coffee or a muffin first. Ronnie Kasrils, previously proud to be known as South Africa’s minister for toilets (his official title was water affairs and forestry minister), says, “No one wants to talk about [human waste], do they? I’d go to public meetings, and no one ever says, ‘You know, man, I’m sick and tired of this disgusting latrine I’ve got.’”
"Diarrhea is the reason you can find a malnourished child in a well-fed family."
The flush toilet may be to blame. The wonderful disposal device did an excellent job of separating us from our potentially cholera-laden waste, but it also flushed sanitation out of the conversation. Yet language is crucial if one of the world’s biggest unaddressed public health crises is to get the attention it needs.

In the 1980s, the Indian government installed hundreds of thousands of new latrines. But those highly subsidized facilities went unused – at least for their intended purpose. Maybe because they were nicer than people’s houses, so they were turned into extra storage space, or temples. Maybe because people didn’t want a latrine near their house, or because they liked to stroll to the woods after eating. Either way, the government learned a lesson that is resonating throughout the sanitation world today: Toilets, and toilet behavior, is never just about the hardware. The software – human psychology and language – is critical.

Take Samiapalli. This village in the Indian state of Orissa was typical, riven by caste problems and wracked by serious alcohol abuse and domestic violence. There was no sanitation; rather, open defecation in nearby woods and along roadsides was the norm. Today – although it took 162 meetings to get everyone to agree (and to contribute to the cost) – everybody has access to a latrine, a bathing room, and running water. With the confidence gained through those 162 meetings, village women kicked out the illegal alcohol brewers and tied the most persistently violent men to a lamppost. Eighty percent more girls now go to school, according to the village leader. Women earn money by growing peanuts and selling other goods at market with the free time they’ve gained from no longer having to spend hours finding somewhere private to do their business, or to fetch cripplingly heavy water. The incidence of diarrhea has dropped dramatically.

“It’s the hardest entry point,” says Madiath, whose nongovernmental organization, Gram Vikas, helped bring the toilet revolution to Samiapalli. “But once you succeed in getting people to talk about sanitation, you can do anything.” In other words, sanitation isn’t a symptom of development. It can be a trigger for it.
Sanitation is also a bargain. Every dollar invested in it reaps an eightfold return, because people spend less on health costs and miss fewer days of work. In a 2008 report, the World Bank calculated that poor sanitation cost Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam 1.3 to 7.2 percent of their gross domestic product. When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, tourism and agricultural losses amounted to three times more than what it would have cost to invest in proper sanitation over the previous decade. And as a disease-prevention mechanism, sanitation is hard to beat, in either effectiveness or price. Treatment of lower acute respiratory illnesses in children under five costs as much as US$264 per DALY (disability-adjusted life year, a standard health prevention unit of calculation). Sanitation costs $11. Hygiene promotion costs $3.
Gram Vikas and the villagers of Samiapalli are not alone. Countless foot soldiers, with little public support and no public champion, are trying to change things. There is Wang Ming Ying, a tiny Chinese woman who is trying to get rural villagers to install household bio-gas digesters, which convert latrine waste into cooking gas and thus lessen deforestation. There is Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, a man who jokes that the world can talk about eating – he calls this “uploading” – so it should be able to talk about downloading too. There is Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange and heir apparent to the Dutch throne, who heads the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. And there is David Kuria, a member of the Rotary Club of Nairobi-Langata who works in the Kibera slum, installing community toilets to cut down on those awful helicopter versions.

Toilet appeal
An architect, Kuria worked in the civil service before turning to toilet provision. The change made perfect sense to him. “I understood that the biggest stimuli for development were water and sanitation,” he says. If they’re in place, then education, public health, and all aspects of livelihood improve – this is widely known. Kuria’s innovation was to understand that toilets have to appeal to people. “Toilets aren’t in people’s top priorities,” he says. “They should be, so what’s the problem? I realized it’s about the way we package a toilet’s social aspects.” To this end, he built a community toilet near Kenya’s parliament building, then persuaded politicians to hold meetings inside the new facility. Music plays, and there is a snack bar. “People told me that was taboo. They said no one would eat food prepared near a toilet. Now there are queues for the snacks.” Kuria also has plans for a “toilet reality show,” where contestants will travel the country in search of good toilets and recommend appropriate solutions for schools and neighborhoods.

Soap manufacturers learned how to market hygiene products over a century ago. Like Kuria, they realized that people don’t usually respond to health messages. Manufacturers never got anywhere by telling people that soap made them more hygienic. Only when their product was sold as sexy did sales flourish. Research in Benin, meanwhile, found that even mothers who see their children suffer again and again from diarrhea aren’t receptive to health advice. No one likes to be nagged. Instead, the mothers said that one of the main motivations for installing a latrine was learning that Benin’s royal family had them.
In some ways, these are exciting times in the sanitation world. The International Year of Sanitation was 2008. The Prince of Orange is a sensible man with access to powerful ears. In 2005, the United States passed the Water for the Poor Act and put real money behind it, mandating that at least $300 million a year go toward water and sanitation.
But the foot soldiers – princes and paupers – need more help than that. Despite the vast benefits that good sanitation can bring, according to Kasrils it was only reluctantly included as a target in the UN Millennium Development Goals, even though failing to meet that target would have domino effects on at least three other goals. A girl dying of diarrhea won’t go to school (Goal 2, achieve universal primary education), or be properly nourished (Goal 1, eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), or be alive past the age of five (Goal 4, reduce child mortality).
And yet few politicians dare to kick up a stink about sanitation. Kasrils was an exception, and he only saw the light because a cholera epidemic taught him that supplying clean water wasn’t much use when people were defecating near it or into it because they had no latrines.

Sanitation sorely needs a new champion. Step up, then, celebrities who happily promote a clean and shiny water faucet in a dusty village, with a photogenic child in tow, but don’t bother to take the few steps over to the latrine that has enabled that child to go back to school and prolonged her life. Sanitation, after all, was voted the best medical advance since 1840, over antibiotics and vaccines, by the knowledgeable readers of the British Medical Journal. Kuria says, “The toilet is at the heart of everything.” Yet still children die from plain and simple diarrhea, because we think sanitation is a dirty word.