Today was our first full day in Ndola, Zambia. We met the staff at Seeds of Hope, Blood:Water Mission’s ministry partner here in Zambia. This is the place where the biosand filters, that you can give to a family next week during our One Drop Campaign, are made from scratch.
These biosand filters don’t make themselves. The people here are hardworking and helping change people’s lives is what they live for.
Mary, the lady on the right with the infectious smile, use to be a volunteer here making biosand filters for her community and she was so good at it and loved her work so much they hired her to build filters for others. Her joy is contagious even in the kind of work most of us would do anything to avoid.
This trip is such a sobering reminder of how good we have it. As one of the men we met today said, “life here is hard.”
You know you live in a tough place when it takes four involved steps just to get a glass of water that won’t kill you.
First, collect the water. Second, sift out major sediments in three buckets. Third, run through biosand filter and finally store in clear bottles. Then they sit in sun for a day to use the ultraviolet rays as one final precautionary purification step. All that for a glass of water. The incredible thing is one biosand filter will clean the water for a family for the next twenty years and the fact that it costs about the same as two of the water filters we put in our fridge is amazing.
I don’t know why I ended up living where I did, but I do know I don’t deserve it and I am certainly no better than any of the people here. They are friendly and generous and I can’t wait to get home to buy some filters for a few of the families I have met!
