Yesterday I had to do an assignment for a class on commercial appeals. I chose a commercial that I remembered seeing during Idol Gives Back. If you were tuning in that night you will probably remember it also. It featured Jennifer Connelly carrying big yellow fuel jugs down to a NYC river to get water for her family. Back at her apartment she filled two tall glasses with the dirty brown water and sat them in front of her children.
You may think blah, blah, blah. What an exaggeration. But this commercial shows what it is truly like for many, many people around the world. 1.1 Billion to be exact. And it shows what it would be like if we Americans, even in the most prestigious cities, were to run out of clean water.
Many of us are worrying right now about those ten pounds we want to lose before beach weather sets in. (Or in my case, the baby I have to get out of me before I show anyone any skin.) I wanted to mention this commercial and this cause, not because I want to diminish our own efforts to get healthy, but because I want to reveal that there are differing levels of what it means to be healthy out there. In our country people are unhealthy for very different reasons than the people in, say, Africa. We deal with indulgence diseases like heart disease and Type II diabetes. They deal with disease that results from not having access to fresh, clean water and not being able to protect themselves from disease-carrying mosquitos. Many of them have so few options. They do the best with what is available to them. Do we?
Some of us may. But think about it. Let us think about all that is available to us and use it only how we truly need it, and only in a way that it will be truly advantageous to us.
Charity:water is the organization which produced this commercial. The founder is only 30 years old and has already put in hundreds of water wells in the poor countries of Africa in the few years of the nonprofit's existence. Visit the website if you get the chance. www.charitywater.org
They have amazing videos, photos, and information. I'm not urging you to give, just encouraging you to discover what's going on out there. And again, I'm not belittling your efforts to be/get healthy, but encouraging you to know that if a mom in Uganda can cook with muddy water (seriously, go look at the pictures) tonight, then you can certainly choose grilled fish and veggies over a burger and fries.
Thanks for reading!
1 comment:
this is probably one of the biggest things on learned from all of my time spent abroad. not only is having clean water a blessing and privilege. but think of all the places that don't even have the option of getting dirty water. there's an organization started by the guys from jars of clay that build wells around the world blood: water mission. thanks for sharing amanda
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