by Marie Devine

Created on: March 19, 2010

Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation claims 4,500 lives a day.  It is difficult to imagine being a mother of a young child awaking in the morning with a full day ahead of them and there is no access to clean water.  The great minds of our century, from many nations, have sought to end suffering of people around the world and often, at the center of the considerations is the need for clean water. 

March 22, 2010 celebrates the fifth year of a ten year goal called the Water for Life Decade from 2005-2015. The UN International Decade for Action on Water hopes to bring solutions to the age old problems of scarce and dirty water; and great monetary resources have been given for the effort. 

Hearts cry out for lasting meaningful change and yet the results are disappointing.  It appears to be an impossible dream as years deteriorate former facilities even in more modern nations. 

Kofi Annan spoke of The United Nations efforts: “Millennium Development Goals set time-bound targets, by which progress in reducing income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter and exclusion - while promoting gender equality, health, education and environmental sustainability – can be measured.  They also embody basic human rights – the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security. ..”  Interestingly enough, it is the very goals they set out to accomplish that have stood in the way of greater progress and guaranteed success. 

Our wise men were raised in a time when the word of God in holy books was chuckled at and dismissed as myths and as stories told to gullible people.  Without that written knowledge passed from God to man and down through the ages, we thought we were right in the way we were going.  It has only been relatively recently that we recognized our employment lifestyle is causing the world problems, not fixing them.

We sought to give women greater equality and we created a system to pull them out of the home. We made jobs for them and each "uplifting" required another “advantage” that created a greater need for resources including water, and left the family and community without the added stability of women at home. 

We took our children away from home and family where they could have learned to be helpful loving family and community members and took them away from their better education, that observing

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