Every day, 5,000 kids under the age of 5 die from water-related illnesses.

Hey everybody!

My seventeenth birthday is next weekend, on the 15th of February. Usually, I make an obligatory wish list of all the things I didn’t get for Christmas around this time every year. Maybe it’s the guilt of knowing I will soon be terrorizing everyone with my appalling driving skills, but this year, I wanted to do something different. I don’t want stuff. I think that we as a society place far too much emphasis on the material things that, at the end of the day, hold no real value. And as a teenaged girl, I’m probably one of the worst offenders. So this year, I’m asking for a well (no, really).

One of the things that we take for granted the most is clean drinking water. We’re pretentious about it, even, choosing Fiji or Evian over plain old tap water, though the sad truth is that nearly a billion people don’t have access to any kind of safe water. Every day, 5,000 kids die from water-related illnesses before they reach their fifth birthday. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are simple solutions like drilled wells, spring protections and BioSand filters that help provide clean water to communities around the world.

I'm asking for my age in dollars from everyone I know. Every penny of the money raised will directly fund clean water projects in developing countries. Even better, charity: water will show us exactly which projects we funded once they've been fully completed (which takes about 18 months). That means we'll know the locations and names of the communities we helped.

Thank you!! -- K