(Profiles Encourage, below in this blog).

They fell in love with that Ugandan refugee camp.

Here are a couple of pics.

That’s their teacher, Kelly at the well.

Great job!

Full story at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/SA_teacher_inspires_students_to_.html

Recent years didn’t look much better for lots of people in Sierra Leone.  War has torn the country up.  Same for their neighbors.  We found ourselves in a refugee camp in the ironically named Kissitown.  It had become home to 60,000 Sierra Leonean and Liberian war refugees. The area where we were, Section F, was home to 2,000 refugees.

With no water.

Then we experienced liberation! A bunch of us got in the habit of liberating ourselves of $1 a day.

We freed ourselves of that dollar so our friends at Kissitown UN Refugee Camp could be free of water worries!

We’re free of that dollar!  Free to help!  Free to love!  Free to give life!  Free to give water!

You know who else had a dream?  Slave-traders!

Man, they thought BIG!  They weren’t afraid to leave their comfort zones.

I was just on the shores of Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the slave trade began.  I looked out over the Atlantic, imagining those ships coming in from Europe and America, the Christian world…

I was struck by the enormity of their project.  Enslaving 10 million people is a lot of work!  All this before diesel-powered ships and trucks.

I wondered if WE could dream of something so big.

All they had on their side was GREED, rigth?  We have LOVE on ours, don’t we?

Can we dream of solving the world water crisis?  They say it would take $10 billion a year.

This year Americans will spend $18 billion on make up.  $450 billion on Christmas.  Why not dream?  Do we love people and justice as much as those traders loved cotton and money?

If one in 10 Americans signed up to give $1 a day here, we’d have enough money to solve the world water crisis.

And $800,000,000 left over.

(For make up?)

It starts with signing up.  Or asking someone else to sign up.

Or is that out of our comfort zone?

Dream.

Love.

ONE in SIX people do not have clean drinking water…

…if ONE in SIX people gave $10 a year…

…the world water crisis…

…would be OVER.

Give a buck.

“Yes!” the children shouted in unanimous unison.

“Would you give a thousand dollars to the poor?”

“Yes!”

“Would you give a one dollar to the poor?”

The room fell silent. “What’s the difference?” the teacher asked.

One honest student offered an answer: “The difference is I have one dollar!”

It’s estimated that $10 billion a year would solve the world water crisis. It sounds like a lot, but Americans spend $18 billion a year on make up! It’s a question of allocation. Most my friends have a dollar.

To all of you who took the challenge to allocate $1 a day for clean water—cheers!

You da real thang.

(Left) Aweil, capitol city of North Bahr al Ghazal in Southern Sudan, another war zone. In a world where celebrities wear Save Darfur t-shirts and call incessantly for someone to save this battle-weary Sudanese region, a bunch of Christians from Living Water International jump in an airplane, go to this war-torn country and hit the ground to start healing people hand-in hand with Sudanese brothers.

If you’d like to support these heroes, ask someone to sing up for One Dollar Water right now and we’ll sponsor some of their work! Hats off to our heroes!

They saw the ONEDOLLARWATER.COM website and thought it was pretty cool. There was one obstacle: they’re a bunch of 6th, 7th and 8th graders with no jobs and no credit cards.

But they didn’t let that stop them. They went to work selling t-shirts, bracelets, they held a “water walk” at their school, they had a fund-raising dinner at a local restaurant. They collected, they asked, they gave and they inspired others to give. Next thing they knew they had $15,000 together to sponsor a well in Uganda.

Today, their teacher Miss Riggs, is in Uganda visiting that well and the people it serves.

Hats off to the kids at Jackson Middle School. If they can ask enough of their friends to provide $15,000 worth of hope and life to war refugees in Uganda, we can ask ours to consider giving $1 a day!

Hooray for the Junior Optimists!

Imagine if that were the natural answer people gave when we asked questions like, “Do you believe in God’s infinite love?”

That’s what I love about this work. We don’t just talk about God’s love—we get to show it.

Over the millennia we Christians have done a lot of theology about this God who is love. One great theologian, Karl Barth, wrote his magnum opus, a work called Church Dogmatics, which is 6 million words on 10,000 pages in 13 volumes.

Jesus’ instructions tended to be much simpler. Stuff like: “Go eat food with people and heal them. Wear sandals, bring a walking stick. You’re good to go.”

Try getting tenure with theology like that!

But it works. Loving other people and healing them reflects God’s love. There’s no sermon for the people in Jharudela, India (where onedollarwater.com just sponsored a well) that would have communicated God’s love like your care, service and healing has.

Ask the people of Jharudela if they believe that we can be the living, loving, healing hands and feet of Christ. Believe it? Hell, they’ve seen it!

Yo fellow Americans! I hope you had a hard-rockin’ Forth of July. Hey, guess who sprung for the hot dogs and Kool Aid at my 7/4 BBQ—yeah, you guessed it: yours truly, baby! That’s ‘cause I, ONEDOLLARWATER.COM, got a J-O-B!

Now I was pretty happy just chillin’ at my parents’ pad. Sometimes they’d be like, “You should get out of the house; go make something of yourself.” And I’d be like, “Dude, I’m just a couple-months-old domain name. Chill out. My homie WATER.CC don’t mind if I just hang. I’m only costing you like 12 bucks a month.”

Then I heard about all these kids in India dying of diarrhea. I was like, no way—the squirts can’t kill you! Then I saw the hospital and this was serious stuff. Now I’m a pretty strong guy—like nailin’ people at football practice and stuff—but when I saw what those kids go through it brought tears to my eyes.

They were drinking from this dirty hole. I found out amoebic dysentery is one painful sickness. Not that I thought it was a walk in the park. Then I found out it would cost less than $5K to provide clean drinking water for this whole village! I also found out that Indians don’t live in tepees.

They were praying for water. So I got on my knees and started praying for water for them too. Then I remembered those dollars you guys have been sending me. I got out the calculator, put two and two together and decided we were on a mission from God!

Man, those kids’ smiles and laughter—you’d have thought every one of them just got a Nintendo Wii. It turned my life around. I spent my last dime on those kids and it was worth every penny. No more piddling around for me. I’m a workin’ man now. Every penny I get I’m going to go out and drill water wells with it. Meanwhile, do me a favor. Scroll back up and look at the kids in this picture. They’re real people. Their suffering is real. Their hope is real. Your help is real. That’s awesome. Thanks.

ODW.C

People in the village Jharudela, India were praying for help. There were 30 people from their village alone in the Sewbhawan Hospital, dangerously ill from drinking contaminated water. Their only source of drinking water was this open well. During the rainy season it fills and turns as brackish and dirty as the puddles around it. So at the wee age of three months, ONEDOLLARWATER.COM went to work providing a new water well!

Manoj Kumar Nag reports a resident of Jharudela saying, “You gave us new life and there is no diarrhea, no water born disease and no child death!”

No child death–how’s that for your dollar today?

“The feet of the community’s children were on air” Manoj adds, “when they saw the water they started dancing. The people are very happy. They said, ‘We consider this the greatest gift of our lives. It will change our lives in many ways.’”

A 78 year old man from Jharudela, in the state of Chhatishgarah, told Living Water International staff: “Now I can die without any burden as my next generation will get safe water. Thank you ONEDOLLARWATER.COM for the unforgettable greatest gift!”

We’re so proud of our little ONEDOLLARWATER.COM! The kid’s got spunk.

Please join us in dreaming of a web community that can change thousands of villages like Jharudela all over the world, and send your suggestions to info@onedollarwater.com. The more people sign up, the more of these stories we’ll get to hear.

Get someone to sign up for ONEDOLLARWATER.COM today. We’ll show them where the dollars go. They’ll love it.

Thank you for this unforgettable greatest gift!