This past weekend, our family joined a dozen other people from our church community, on a muggy Amsterdam summer day, to walk 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles) from our ministry center on the Herengracht to the main park in the city’s Old South, and back… carrying buckets of water on our heads.

We were doing it to raise awareness for issues of water and sanitation in the developing world.  Ever since the establishment of our ministry in Amsterdam, we’ve made "social justice" an important part of our work in the city; but especially in the last few months, we’ve been making more of an effort to focus our attention in this area.  Three young women from our church (one of whom holds a masters degree in international development) have spear-headed a recent campaign to coordinate and crystallize our goals for the church’s social justice ministry according to the following mission statement:

"As a Christian community, our aim is to increase awareness and action on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, in order that we may be a bright light, radiating God’s love to our ‘neighbors’ through involvement in the fight against social injustice, both locally and globally."

And one of the first issues that we’ve now chosen to tackle is world-wide water and sanitation.  It may not seem like a very spiritual issue.  But the fact of the matter is that water is one of the most basic needs in the world -- and yet it’s one of the most unequally distributed resources in the world, as well.  As we’ve been studying this issue further, we’ve learned that the average person in the Netherlands uses 127.5 liters (33.7 gallons) of water per day (and in case my North American readers are curious, it’s even more in the USA -- about three times as much, in fact!).  But in contrast, the average person in developing countries uses just 10 liters of water per day.  Women and children have to collect all the water by hand, and the average distance a woman walks to collect water is 6 kilometers (3.72 miles) -- sometimes doing this three times a day.   And the weight of water that women carry on their heads is 20 kilograms (44 pounds)...

Or, to look at it from the global level, 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.  2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation (places to properly wash hands or go to the toilet).  Unsafe water and sanitation causes 80% of all sickness and disease, and cause 6000 people to die every day (90% are children under the age of 5.)   This means that unsafe water and sanitation kill more people than all other forms of violence, including war.  It’s crazy to write it out like that -- but it’s true.  These statistics can be overwhelming…

Suffice to say:  water and sanitation are very significant issues in the world today!

So when it was proposed that the women and children of Zolder50 should organize this "Water Walk" -- to help identify with the women and children in the developing world, to raise the general level of awareness among Amsterdammers for these issues, and to "advertise" for a fund-raising event later that evening --  our family decided to join in.  Marci walked the whole way.  Elliot and Olivia walked for parts of the way.  And Cor and I offered logistical support (a luxury, of course, that most African families don't have), riding alongside in the bakfiets:  offering a place for the older kids to sit when they got tired, displaying a couple of posters that explained more about what we were doing, passing out flyers, taking pictures, and that sort of thing.

It seemed like it was an exhausting experience for those who participated... but also an enriching one.

In case you might be interested in learning more about issues of water and sanitation in the developing world -- and perhaps exploring ways that you could get personally involved -- here are a few links to organizations that could assist you:

• Healthy Vine
• WaterAid
• Living Water International
• Nuru International
• Malaria No More
• WHO (World Health Organisation)
• AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development)

And in case you might like to see some more pictures from the Water Walk, you can visit the Zolder50 Pictures section of this website.