At St Wulfram’s Church for this Harvest Thanksgiving we are asking if you will donate to WaterAid so that villages like Vatuvou in the island nation of Timor Leste in Southeast Asia can get a reliable source of clean water.
Here you will find a donation money box that you can print, cut out and stick together to collect your coins in. Perhaps keep it somewhere in sight and make a pledge, for example – every time you spend a penny donate one to WaterAid?
The Harvest service will take place at 9:30am on Sunday, 27 September. Please bring along your money box with you to the service or you can make an online donation here.
Along with WaterAid we will of course accept donations for Grantham Foodbank. The best way that we can do that for them is for you to make a donation here.
We are joining many others across the country in supporting WaterAid’s Harvest Appeal, helping transform lives in some of the poorest communities around the world.
The funds raised will help WaterAid bring clean drinking water to communities like Vatuvou so that people can stay healthy and will be able to safeguard their harvests.
WaterAid’s Harvest Appeal will help people like 57-year-old grandmother, Felisberta, from the village of Vatuvou who has to make the long, dangerous trip along a rocky, dried up riverbed to the uphill water source to get water for her family. She often struggles with the journey in the tropical heat.
Felisberta’s community depends on farming to make a living but lack of access to water makes it hard to grow anything outside the rainy season. It’s also killing her family’s livestock – their biggest source of income.
Felisberta says: “Because we have less water, we try to manage it – we use it for drinking. That’s why sometimes the kids don’t take a shower or a bath. We also don’t really wash our clothes.
“I feel tired when I am doing the long round trip to collect water. But I have to because I am the one who collects the water and if I don’t do that then the kids are not going to eat.”
One in five people in Timor Leste don’t have clean water close to home and almost half of the population do not have a decent toilet. Lack of access to clean water and handwashing facilities, poverty, hunger and climate extremes combined with fragile healthcare systems make communities like Felisberta’s extremely vulnerable to diseases and crisis, like Covid-19. Now more than ever, it is vital that the world’s poorest communities have access to clean water and good hygiene.
Felicity de Ste Croix, Communities and Volunteering Manager at WaterAid, said: “Faith groups, schools and community groups play a vital role in WaterAid’s work, bringing much-needed funds to transform lives with clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene.
“By coming together this harvest, groups across the UK can help ensure communities around the world have enough to eat and drink and can be healthy and financially secure.
“The simple gift of clean water means others have harvests worth celebrating.”
Last harvest, churches and community groups in the UK raised £130,000 for WaterAid, helping bring clean water and decent toilets to other communities around the world, like the village of Zabendella in Burkina Faso where Rasmata lives. WaterAid installed 12 compostable toilets that transform waste into fertiliser as well as two wells that provide water for the market garden. Rasmata and her community can now grow vegetables and earn an income in the dry season.
WaterAid is working to make clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene normal for everyone, everywhere within a generation. The international not-for-profit organisation works in 28 countries to change the lives of the poorest and most marginalised people. Since 1981, WaterAid has reached 26.4 million people with clean water and 26.3 million people with decent toilets. For more information, visit www.wateraid.org, follow @WaterAidUK or @WaterAidPress on Twitter, or find WaterAid UK on Facebook at www.facebook.com/wateraid.
- 785 million people in the world – one in ten – do not have clean water close to home.[1]
- 2 billion people in the world – almost one in four – do not have a decent toilet of their own.[2]
- Around 310,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor water and sanitation. That’s around 800 children a day, or one child every two minutes.[3]
- Every £1 invested in water and toilets returns an average of £4 in increased productivity.[4]
- Just £15 can provide one person with clean water.[5]
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