The Real Water Crisis

It’s been a week since the people of Lancashire were forced to boil any tap water they wished to consume after a bug that causes sickness and diarrhoea contaminated water. The reason behind the contamination is thought to be from animal excrement and there is no sign of it going anywhere soon.

Boo-hoo.

A week of boiling water in order to drink it has prompted one morning TV news programme, Good Morning Britain, to run a segment on the apparent ‘crisis’. There, we hear from a family who ‘can’t wait’ for things to go back to ‘normal’ after a week of apparent agony.

Yet somehow I have absolutely no sympathy.

Perhaps having to boil water that you can get from a tap is a hell of a lot better than having to walk miles and miles to get it, only to have to carry it in a huge container all the way back. Perhaps having to boil your water to ensure it’s clean is a hell of a lot easier to cope with than having to drink it anyway, dicing with a disease like Cholera.

Imagine that, eh?

So forgive me for not having compassion for the family with a strong roof over their heads, a home equipped with a TV,  a sofa – even beds. Oh, and a tap that usually filters out clean water whenever they wish.

But the family I do have compassion for is the one with a tiny house that is, at most, equipped with one or two beds and that is filled with children loved dearly by their parents, who have no other choice than to drink any water they can come by- whether it’s dirty or not. That is the family who knows the true struggle, the family who would give anything if it meant they could simply boil a kettle filled to maximum capacity with one vital natural resource: water.

The real water crisis lies in foreign lands and if we spent as much time talking about that as we have about the poor people in Lancashire, there’d be a lot more awareness. And if we spent the money that is going to be issued out to families as compensation on dealing with the real water crisis, a lot of babies, children and adults would be ten times better off than they are now.