30 days is a long time to do something. However, a lifetime of travelling to retrieve contaminated water for your family is even longer. In today's morning stream I go into depth on why I am doing this challenge for 30 days.
What I have found, as I explore and learn new things, whether they be technical or philosophical in nature, is that it takes time and immersion into a subject to truly understand it. To feel like I had some sort of personal grasp on understanding the water crisis, I listened to Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of charity:water on a couple of podcasts. I bought his new book, Thirst, on audible, and over the course of a week or two, listened to Scott's personal journey, and the stories of many of those directly affected by the global water crisis.
After several weeks of listening, learning, and internalizing, I felt that I had a good grasp on the problems being encountered. And, I felt motivated to join in on the cause, to do something about the problem. In addition to raising money, how could I my personal couple weeks of learning, and recreate that for my community? By streaming for 30 days, I hope to impart some of that same immersive learning to my friends and family. If I can help a few other people internalize the problem the same way I have, then maybe they would be motivated to do something about it too.
Next, by streaming for 30 days, I hope to show others that they can participate in a 24 hour challenge. That, if I can inconvenience myself for an entire month, maybe they can be inconvenienced for a few minutes, a few times, for one day. If I personally did a 24 hour challenge, others might not understand the sincerity and deepness that I have for this issue.
Finally, by streaming for 30 days, I hope to grow my understanding into empathy. We can try to know what it's like to walk in other people's shoes, but without experiencing it firsthand, how can we really know? By drawing out this inconvenience for an entire month, maybe I can have a glimpse of what it's like to not have access to clean water. As my mother so elegantly summarized when sharing one of my videos, this challenge is "a dim reflection" of what it might be like to be impacted by having no access to clean water. Wise words.
Next, some updates on the challenge progress and getting other people to join. I had a surprise live stream guest, Hamza Adams, on one of my streams. Hamza lives in Ghana, Africa, a fairly well developed country in Africa. I met Hamza on a trip to Ghana in 2004. Hamza explains how the water crisis affects people even in his immediate community, despite having access to technology and other modern conveniences.
Hamza is joining in on the #StreamForWellsChallenge and wants to partner with all of us to help solve this problem! This is by far one of the coolest things that has happened (and organically), as a result of kicking off this challenge. What is more impactful, than hearing directly from those in afflicted areas, and seeing them being eager and willing to join in on the campaign!
We managed to get out and find a tree we liked later in the day, and got it up in the living room. Consider for a minute, that our Christmas Trees, have better access to clean water than 663 million people. Craziness. We are so blessed.
Here are the remainder of the days live stream sessions for your enjoyment, or just to catch-up! Thank you for reading.