Scaling Kilimanjaro for Water

Nov 3rd, 2009 4:04 PM UTC
By Elizabeth Gore

Today we have a guest post from Elizabeth Gore, the executive director of global partnerships and Nothing But Nets for the United Nations Foundation:

I am a runner; I also swim and bike, but mostly I run. I like the repetitiveness, the solitude, and the opportunity to challenge myself. Being from the flat warm state of Texas, I’m not a climber and I do not dig the cold. When Kenna, Grammy-winner artist and the creator of Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro, approached me to climb with him to bring awareness and raise money for the clean water crisis, my body did not react with an obvious, immediate “Yes!” due to altitude and cold BUT, my brain jumped at the chance to talk about the world’s next major crisis.

Today 1 billion people around the globe have a hard time finding the 7 liters of water needed to survive, let alone the 50 liters needed to thrive. In the developed world we use 300 liters a day to drink, wash and cook – and that doesn’t take into account the thousands of liters our food needs just to get to the table. So it’s hard for us to understand the concept of literally NO potable water.

Picture a refugee camp in Ethiopia – a place classically challenged in this water crisis. The landscape is drier than ever due to climate change, the depth to which one used to have to drill to reach water is no longer viable so traditional well techniques have stopped working; the water must be trucked in from hours away. The other, sometimes more cruel, scenario is lots of water, but it’s filled with water borne disease. Infecting people with diarrhea, giardia and breeding mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Out of the 40 million people in the care of UNHCR, half of those do not have access to clean water.

There are solutions, many of them, but they are not yet widely funded and adopted. Things such as sachets to cleanse existing water, pumping systems that work more efficiently, pipelines, etc., can help us to remedy this very serious problem. But most of us have no idea that for the majority of people living there is no tap that delivers clean, safe water; that to exist one must carry 40 lbs of water up to six miles, every day.

So for all of these reasons, my brain is forcing my body into submission. Each day I run stairs and workout harder than I ever have before to get ready to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro with the Summit on the Summit team — Kenna, Jessica Biel, Kick Kennedy, Lupe Fiasco, Simon Isaacs and Isabel Lucas and others — so that all of us can bring awareness to this dire and worsening issue. Join us at summitonthesummit.com.

-Elizabeth Gore

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