The 1,900 Foot Climb For Water
Lupe Fiasco, Kenna, Jessica Biel, and others climbed Mount Kilimanjaro recently to raise to awareness of the global water crisis. Your probably wondering what do they have to do with each other. Well, sometimes people do weird shit to get attention i.e. people walk in circles for days to raise money for cancer. (c) Julian G. So what is it that we need to know about the water crisis?? Well here are some not so fun facts.
- 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease. (11)
- 43% of water-related deaths are due to diarrhea. (11)
- 84% of water-related deaths are in children ages 0 – 14. (11)
- 98% of water-related deaths occur in the developing world. (11)
- 884 million people, lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people. (5)
- The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. (1)
- At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease. (1)
- Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. (12)
Please check out http://summitonthesummit.com for detailed accounts of their climb.
Facts cited at water.org
Dear Haiti…
As I sit at my desk and browse through countless internet clips and news articles covering the horrific events currently taking place in Haiti, my mind is in limbo. I find it hard to concentrate on the repetitive mind numbing financial data analysis that is my job, without being overwhelmed by the rush of emotion I feel with each article. I came across a clip that showed a young woman trapped under a collapsed concrete building screaming in a deafening violent rage while being pulled at the neck by family members in an attempt to save her. Something about seeing human life so close to the brink of nothingness really struck a chord with me. As my eyes began to water I lifted them away from the screen and started to scan the rest of the office. The people in my immediate view path continued to work diligently on their spread sheets or presentations, completely mindless and un moved by the current events of emergency that were clogging the airwaves and televisions. And like anything else I do, I want to figure out why. How can we watch this footage and remain indifferent. Our enslavement to work, individuality, and materialism, leaves us unhealthily emotionally detached from anything that doesn't affect us directly. We need to understand that there is a oneness amongst all living humans that is vehemently ignored. Life is not a singular phenomenon. Life is a plural. Me, you, the thousands of people dying in Haiti all share, and are connected through life. We all inhale and exhale, worry, get excited, become sad, worry, cry, scream and so on. We share the "collective" human experience, so to go unmoved by this baffles me.
We saw the same behavior during hurricane Katrina spear headed by the lack of government action to extend help to those in suffering. When there is disaster that causes or adds a great deal to human death and suffering is cannot be ignored. Action has to be taken. I am not writing this to urge people to fly to Haiti and start scooping people out the gutter to safety because it isn't possible or realistic for a lot of us. I urge you to awaken and move toward a shift in consciousness. A lot of us uppity, spoiled, pretentious Americans have already written Haiti off in our minds as a suffering hell hole that they want no parts of. A place that breeds violence and evil. Sadly these "learned" emotions have been perpetuated through ignorance and fabrication igniting stereo-types and a morbid sense of indifference." The problem with stereo types is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete." ©Anonymous. Learn your history. Haiti has a very rich history that the vast majority of us would never know about. The first step is getting informed and engendering your connectedness to the globe. I don't care how you feel about any group of people. To see human suffering for no reason is beyond unsettling. Wyclef Jean a Haitian native has campaigned in America to raise awareness of political and social unrest that's plaguing the island. Imagine living in a place where the sun barely shines and the grass barely grows. Imagine waking up to a morbid cloud of hopelessness and complacency. Imagine this being your home. And imagine waking up one day, and it's being erased building by building, vibration by vibration, in front of your eyes like the shake of a 1980s etch-a- sketch.