ONE Sabbath ‘Splash’ Success in Coralville, Iowa

Nov 12th, 2007 11:44 AM UTC
By Aaron Banks

As part of ONE Sabbath, ONE’s new outreach initiative to people and communities of faith, we’re asking our members to share stories of what their faith communities are already doing to make poverty history. ONE member Polly Nichols sent in this great post on the important work New Song Episcopal Church is doing in Coralville, Iowa.

-Aaron Banks

“Our youth group is sponsoring a Splash-a-thon to help provide clean, safe water for people in Swaziland. Swaziland is our sister diocese in Africa, one whose bishop has visited us and whom we pray for and with every Sunday.

The Splash-a-thon will be launched at a swimming and water-play party held in Des Moines this month during the annual Episcopal convention. Every church will pick up pledge sheets there for their young people to use signing up donors for each minute they splash over the winter months.

As the minutes accumulate, so will our churches’ understanding of the value of clean water and what the lack of it costs in human health and lives. To raise awareness, the splash-a-thon will be accompanied by online mini-lessons on water in the developing world.

It is with no sense of superiority that we undertake this project to give money to Swaziland’s people to help them with their water problems. Rather, we give with humility and embarrassment that as Iowans, we ourselves are so mindlessly spoiling a resource that Africans are literally dying to have.

New Song’s youth members are also planning the final event they will hold after three months of Splash-a-thon activity, a splashy affair devoted to gathering in the pledges, totaling them up, and celebrating individual and team successes with fun and silly prizes. We will know then how many families we supplied with water purification kits and how much extra money we contributed to a major Swaziland water project that is under way. And, together with our Swaziland friends, we will have learned how to be advocates for protecting God’s gift of safe and clean water here at home as well as in Africa.

Polly Nichols, Ph.D.
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics”

TAGS: Faith, ONE Sabbath, Water and Sanitation