A eye opening article by one of our student

Hi all,

I just wanted to share a wonderful experience that I had with a few kids from a group called ‘Apun Ka Club’. It was a great experience. We played games together and had loads of fun. (I went along with many other friends of mine) After all the fun stuff, I heard a very shocking news. Those children (living at simla nagar) got water only for 1 hour throughout the day!! Just 1 hour in 24 hours! Now many of you all might just delete this e-mail or not read any further and mark this e-mail as junk thinking that it might be another lecture about saving water and all. But I request you to read further and see how these people struggle for water. It doesn’t make a difference to us who get water for 24 hours. But imagine them-they get water only for 1 hour throughout the day!! ….. And that’s not all…

This is their situation:

Approximately 7-8 families are expected to get water from ONE tap. Yes, that’s right. Each family has about 4-5 members. So at an average, 40 people are expected to get water form ONE tap.

Every evening one or two members of the family go to the tap at about 5:00 p.m. to collect water for the next 24 hours. After collecting this water they can collect water only the next day at the same time.

However, nowadays the water comes very irregularly. Sometimes at 7:00, sometimes at 7:30 or even at 8:00 p.m.

One of them even told me that on that Sunday, the water did not arrive till 11:30 in the night. Many of them did not even eat their food thinking that if, while they are eating, the water suddenly came, they might not get a chance to collect their share of water for the next 24 hours!

We asked them a question:

If you were standing in line, and by the time you reach the tap or even before that, the water stops coming, what do you do?

Their answer was:

We go to some other tap and fill our water. And if the water has stopped coming there also, we ask our neighbors to lend us a little water so that we can survive. And yes, they very willingly give us.

What an experience!

When we were packing up, a small girl Ganga from ‘Apun Ka Club’ came to Shitalaunty (our Art teacher who has also initiated this 'Apun Ka Club' where she works with these children every Saturday at Shantivan garden) and silently told her, “Didi, paani hi humara jeevan hai!”
So, the next time you are wasting water, just think about these people and see if you can anyhow save that water. And these aren’t the only people. There are many more that we don’t know of!

So this new year try and make a resolution to do something for our mother earth
Thank you.

SAVE WATER, SAVE THE EARTH.
I AM DOING MY BIT.
ARE YOU?

Yours lovingly,
Alomi Parikh