Water – Corner View

Water for Christmas
I’m starting to think about Christmas gifts. Do you have people on your list that are hard to buy for? Me, too.

Last Christmas we bought a goat for poor African families in honor of our more difficult-to-buy-for loved ones.

This year I’m thinking of doing something similar. Since this week’s Corner View theme is “water,” I looked up World Vision water gifts.

Here are a few ways to touch other corners of the world from our own small corners—with fresh water.

For more Corner Views of water, click through the links at Jane’s place.

1. Clean Water Fund

$25

“Clean water, sanitation, and hygiene can cut a community’s child death rate in half. Your gift to World Vision’s Clean Water Fund will help save children from suffering or dying from parasites, worms, dysentery, and diarrhea.

And they’ll be able to attend school, because they won’t have to spend their days sick in bed, or walking long distances to fetch water. You’ll change lives forever.”

2. Water and Sanitation

$50

“Every day, nearly 4,000 children die as a result of drinking unsafe water. Every 22 seconds a child perishes from waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. Six million people are blind as a result of contaminated water and bacteria.

Your gift will help us dig wells, provide purification equipment to treat contaminated water, and water storage containers to save fresh rainwater for later use.”

3. Share of a Foot-Powered Water Pump

$50

“A foot-powered water pump creates "miracle" harvests. This ingenious yet simple water pump is a miracle for farmers who once had to irrigate their crops by carrying buckets of water back and forth. You'll provide an efficient supply of water so families can grow more food year-round to feed their children and sell the surplus at the market.”

4. Water Purification Tablets

$50

“Emergency water saves children from cholera, typhoid, and death. When typhoon-driven floods, earthquakes, or other disasters hit, we need to act fast to prevent needless deaths from lack of safe water. Simple-to-use water purification tablets stop the spread of deadly diseases.”

5. Share of a Traditional Well

$75

“In countries like Malawi, a well just 60 feet deep can bring new health and life to a community of 150 people. The well your gift helps provide will be capable of supplying more than 600 gallons of safe water a day for drinking, bathing, irrigating crops, and watering livestock.”

* * *

If you didn’t have clean water, it would be the best gift I could buy—instead of wasting money on another unneeded gift for someone who already has more than they know what to do with.

Unfortunately, along with millions of others, we’ll still spend too much cash (and credit) on gifts no one needs. But more and more, I pray we’ll open our eyes to true needs instead.

And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.
Matthew 10:42