Update on Upcoming Oregon Coast Trail Walk for Clean Water

I’m getting set to begin a walk of the 382 mile Oregon Coast Trail in a few weeks, for the purpose of raising awareness and funds for projects working to end poverty through enabling access of clean water for the nearly 1 billion people on earth lacking life’s most essential resource.

I thought i would share a few updates on the preparation, ways you can follow or support my walk, and possibilities of what I’ll be doing once the walk has been completed.

• I am incredibly honored and grateful to Teton Sports who has generously sponsored my walk with a tent and other camping equipment I will be using and reviewing along this journey.
• If you have a business or organization and would like to sponsor my walk, please contact me to discuss ways you can become a sponsor and thank you benefits I offer sponsors in return for their support.
• As of last night I have launched a website (www.dylanrainwalker.com) for displaying the solutions my walk supports through partnerships with non-profit organizations working to provide access of clean water in places of greatest need.
• I have connected with the non-profit organization Water1st.org to support their projects in Ethiopia.

Ways to Follow My Walk

The best way to follow my walk is to subscribe to my weekly newsletter by entering your email address at www.dylanrainwalker.com. I will also be frequently updating my walking blog here with stories, photos, and videos, as well as updates on twitter.

Ways to Support My Walk

Spread The Word.
Share the information found at www.dylanrainwalker.com with your friends on twitter and facebook. By sharing my walk you are not only raising awareness for what I am doing, but for the issues of poverty and the need for clean water around the world.

Walk With Me.
If you’re available and able, I welcome anyone and everyone to join me for any portion of this walk of the Oregon Coast. Contact me to discuss where you might like to walk and I look forward to meeting and sharing the grand experience of walking!

Sponsorship.
You can sponsor my walk as a business, organization, or individual. Your sponsorship is what enables me to walk and continue my work connecting with organizations, discover solutions, and working to see that those solutions are fully supported to start impacting the lives of people in need of clean water. Learn more about becoming a sponsor.

 

A Billboard to Change the World

In Bujama, Peru, a small village with an oppressive climate located just south of Peru’s capital city of Lima, people who have lacked access to clean water in the past are now gaining access through quite an innovative technology – a billboard.

The billboard was developed by MediaConnection BPN (part of IPG Mediabrands ) and Mayo DraftFCB for UTEC, the University of Technology and Engineering in Peru at a cost of $32,600. It works by using panels which trap the humidity within air and transforms it into clean and safe water for people living in the region.

The water is stored in the top of the structure and then filtered through a pipe to the ground below where it can be withdrawn from a tap for any person who happens to pass by the giant sign.

Below is a video about this achievement in providing clean water to people in need. Now if we could only achieve the same benefits from television advertising 🙂

Clear Channel Peru: World’s first water-making billboard from Clear Channel International on Vimeo.

Related articles

• UTEC: Potable Water Generator (ibelieveinadv.com)
• Drip ‘A’ Drop (advocacyactivismagency.wordpress.com)
• UTEC : Potable Water Generator (adoholik.com)
• Marketing for good: Billboard creates water from air humidity (metro.co.uk)
• Peru Wins World Travel Award For “Best Tourism Office in South America” For A Third Year (canadafreepress.com)
• Lima, Peru and my arrival in Chiclayo (cieradesilva.wordpress.com)

How Desalination Works and Can Transform More than Seawater

Desalination is the process by which salt is removed from seawater enabling water from the ocean to be transformed into a fresh drinkable source for human life. Only a small percentage, 2.5% to be precise, of all water on earth is freshwater and suitable for drinking. Water covers around 70% of the earth, which means that 97.5% of the abundant supply of water available is being utilized.

Water is a resource that many of us rarely give much of a thought about. We walk into our kitchens, turn on a faucet and wash our hands or fill our glass. How often do we consider that nearly 1 billion people on earth do not have access to water, and those who do generally must walk for miles simply to fill buckets with water that is contaminated, leading to disease and ultimately, death?

Desalination is a viable solution to change the suffering of millions around the world. With desalination we possess the capability of not only transforming seawater into freshwater, but we have the ability to transform communities from being riddled by disease into communities of people with access to resource most crucial for life to exist at all – water.

Some will cite expense as being a main restriction in utilizing the desalination process as a true solution of providing safe freshwater to meet the human world’s needs. However, when we have the technology available to meet the needs of life on earth, I am of the persuasion that anything we may use as an excuse to implement technology for the betterment of mankind is a sign that our priorities may be greatly disordered.

In this brief Ted Talk by Damian Palin he shares some helpful information on “Seawater reverse osmosis”, also known as desalination:

Our Journey To Solve Global Problems

We are on a journey to see that problems in our world which technically need not exist be eliminated through understanding and implementing solutions.

It is within my reason that there is no technical reason why people on earth lack life’s vital needs such as clean water, healthy food, safe shelter, and access to tools enabling communication and education (e.g. relationships).

We as human beings have engineered incredible technological achievements that could easily provide a high quality of life for all people. Because we have the capability, but have not yet chosen to utilize technology for the betterment and liberation of those who are imprisoned by the devices of poverty, my conclusion can only be that the true solutions to our world’s problems dwell within the thinking and heart of each individual, community, country, and species of humanity.

A change in our thinking and what we view to be important is the first step in seeing generosity spread, first from the individual, then to the community, and then through the world. When a community knows generosity they know no poverty because the resources available are freely shared with each other, not for profit or power over each other, but from a realization that the welfare of another is also the welfare of our-self. If I am well fed while another is starving, while the resources are available for both of us to be well fed, this screams to the attention that something must be done, something must change.

When I first began to become aware of the problems of starvation, disease, lack of clean water, and the countless deaths of children happening around the world due to poverty, I found myself questioning how one could possibly make a difference in regards to the problems which have existed for as long as any of us can remember. What confounded my logic all the more was to learn that the problems didn’t need to actually exist. I first thought that surely these problems are just the way things are and there is no changing the way things are. I took a deep journey of introspection to discover the core of these problems in hopes of also discovering a way to solve the problem within us that perpetuates “the way things are.”

I first traveled across the United States to meet the homeless. I grew up in a lower-middle class home which by no means was wealthy by American standards, but I had also never experienced what it was truly like not to have a roof over my head at night, food in my belly, and the many other comforts which life for most in America avails. So, I wanted to go to cities through America to met the homeless, those often overlooked by the majority of society, to understand how they had arrived to the circumstantial place in life they had.

I went with the intent of providing meals for those who were hungry, and although food was appreciated, I discovered that the true thing the homeless desired was simply my time, recognition of their humanity, and someone who would listen. This was my first clue into what can make a difference – relationship to one another.

We live in a world with unsurpassed tools of communication and connecting with one another. But on the other hand, this enhancement of ability to connect with one another, I think, has lead to us growing more disconnected in ways that can be difficult to measure with algorithms and metrics. How can we measure the level of connection with one another? That, to me, is something quite intangible which cannot  be so easily defined with numbers and letters. A deep connection of relationship to one another is something that can be expressed simply in the look two people exchange with one another, the touch of a hug or pat on the back, and the time spent simply listening to another tell their story. Listening is a two-way activity and is starkly different than reading someone’s story through a news article, facebook feed, or blog post.

When the human connection is made we begin to feel that another’s well being is important to us, and the spirit of generosity begins to be given room to grow.

Related articles

• What Causes Poverty? (dylanrainwalker.wordpress.com)
• The structure of public problems (clubtroppo.com.au)
• Sleeping Homeless (plushbeds.com)
• National event asks: can we solve global poverty? (newsmaker.com.au)
• Homeless in Hawaii? State Will Fly You Back to Family on Mainland (civilbeat.com)
• Make the Homeless Smile (bissellcentre.org)
• In Bringing Heaven to Earth, be Yourself – A Message from the Angels, 21 July 2013 (bluedragonjournal.com)
• Manufactured Poverty: a reality but not a necessity (anelegantfeast.wordpress.com)
• Aid to End Poverty: Throwing Out the Magic Box (unprisonment.wordpress.com)
• Walking for Clean Water (barefootbarn.wordpress.com)

What If You Didn’t Have Clean Water?

Clean water is likely the most valuable resource in the world, yet, so many of us cannot imagine what our lives would be like if we were one of the nearly 1 billion people on earth who lacked this vital resource of life.

What would your life be like if instead of being to walk into the kitchen to find clean water within your faucet, you had to walk 6 miles to fill a bucket with contaminated water – water that you knew would cause sickness – simply to survive?

What would your life be like if showers, bathing, and hand-washing didn’t exist in your world, but your entire community was filled with disease and malnutrition?

Water greatly impacts every aspect of our daily lives. It enables the growth of our food and every aspect of caring for our health. We who have free access to such a vital resource likely rarely give a thought to what our lives would be like if we did not have the plentiful supply of h2o streaming from our sinks and faucets. But we should.

I do not propose that the thought we should have is one of what it would be like to suffer as millions do without clean water; rather, our thought should be one of compassion and sharing what we do have with others who do not. Charity is not an act of pity for someone, but an act of generosity and recognition that others are just as valuable and deserve to live a quality, healthy life with the same opportunities and access that come with having clean water.

We not only have the opportunity to share clean water with those who do not have it, but we can do so in a very simple and easy way. Just $1 can provide clean water to someone in need for an entire year.

Consider the things we spend $1 in a day to purchase, and consider whether or not it may be something unhealthy. Would we be willing to change habits in order to give someone else clean water, the most important thing we need to live?

If you’d like to give $1 or more to provide clean water, take a look at the organizations I have connected with to provide clean water, and visit their links to learn and get involved.

 

Related articles

• Speaking Out for Clean Water Protections (sierraclub.typepad.com)
• School Administrator and Principals discuss the need for clean drinking water (kwguyana.wordpress.com)
• Have you ever thought what affects “clean water availability”! (shreestighosh.wordpress.com)
• Child Sponsorship and Clean Water in India (hopeastounding.wordpress.com)
• How Clean is the Water in the Thames? (harveywatersofteners.co.uk)
• Heading Back to Uganda (sustainablemissions.wordpress.com)
• Wozniak Announces Clean Water Grant Award to BCIMA (gantdaily.com)

The Child Who Will Die If We Do Not Act

We are all familiar with the images spread by non-profit organizations of starving children with flies covering their bodies as they rot in the streets of impoverished villages around the world. This post isn’t going to be one of those advertisements. This post is not meant to guilt trip anyone into doing anything, but to inspire us with the notion that we can make a difference in someone’s life now.

In 2006 I had a dream. In that dream I was walking the streets of one of those impoverished villages of which advertising has made us familiar. I came upon a small child, sitting in the street, and instantly knew that his life would end tomorrow because he didn’t have clean and safe water. I also had the revelation in the dream that I could give my life for him to have another day, and I did.

From that moment I was changed. I now had a mission in life: to do anything I could to see that the child in my dream, as unknown as he was to me personally, would have a chance at living. And each of us has that opportunity right now.

Clean water is the most fundamental element of life. It is technically illogical that nearly 1 billion people on earth lack access to that vital resource. We have the ability, engineering capacity, and finances to make it happen – clean water for the world. But it has to be a priority. Providing clean water must be seen as highly relevant not only to those who are in need of safe water, but relevant to those of us who simply walk into our kitchen or step into our shower to quench our thirst and clean ourselves.

A water well, costing as little as $5,000 can provide clean water to 250 – 500 people for 10 – 20 years. This means that merely $1 can potentially give clean water to that child who was dying in my dream for an entire year.  Clean water not only impacts lives with quenching thirst and sanitation, but impacts nearly all other aspects of the health of the individual and community. Water enables agriculture and the growing of food. But more importantly than simply the physical benefits of clean water, it provides hope, and when a community has hope, everything changes.

Will you join with me in committing to eliminate the lack of access to clean water around the world? Please connect with me to discuss projects you may know about working to provide clean water, let me know about organizations I should support through my long-distance walking, or make a donation to fund the projects I support. Your donation, even if just $1 will have a huge impact on the life of someone in need.

Thank you for your time,

Dylan

Related articles

• What Causes Poverty? (dylanrainwalker.wordpress.com)
• Child Sponsorship and Clean Water in India (hopeastounding.wordpress.com)
• Heading Back to Uganda (sustainablemissions.wordpress.com)
• Speaking Out for Clean Water Protections (sierraclub.typepad.com)
• Can 3D Technology Help to Provide Clean Drinking Water to Those in Need? (business2community.com)
• charity: water Partners with WorkZone Project Management Software to Coordinate New Water Well Monitoring Initiatives Worldwide (prweb.com)
• WaterAid Providing Taps and Toilets for Madagascar’s children (thirdeyemom.com)