Rene-3/11/2009-Charity:Water

This week, with my partners Thomas, Nile, Malcolm and Jonah and Milo who joined recently; we went to Charity:Water. We worked with a woman named Georgia, who is working on a project there that obtained to our topic of water. What surprised me about this organization, is the way they run. With only 15 employees, Charity:Water works on a number of different projects thorough out the year. People there like Georgia who were interested in her topic, chose to work on that one for a whole year. Others choose other topics, but they all had to do with getting clean wells to different regions of Africa. What Georgia and her “team’s” project is, is to get 100 schools to sign up for their organizations site. After a school was signed up, you would get a shipment of product to sell. (We got to see the room where they store all the products and there was a shelf up to the ceiling!) The merchandise range from hats, water, bracelets, etc. With the money you made from selling these things, you would send it back to charity water, and they would keep it. At the end of the year, they would count how much money they have and no matter how much, they would send it to make wells in African schools. I was also surprised by the high number of their goal, 2 million dollars! Yet i think they can make it since they already have over 110 schools since september signed up. For my Teach In, I’d love to use all the visuals that Georgia gave us. She gave us photos, bracelets, and a Jerry Can. It was really sad to find out that kids half our sizes were carrying 2 maybe 3 Jerry Cans, which can weigh up to 40 pounds of water, 3 or 4 miles every day. I learned that if we work together as schools all around the country we could help other schools in countries that need basic things like water, food, and supplies. It’s not like any money is coming out of our pockets. What if every school in the country participated, we could make enough money to send to get over 100,000 wells to African Schools. I just think it’s a shame that organizations like these are unknown. This is a photo of a well being made, Georgia gave it to us along with a few other pictures that we will be using in our teach in.