We are a family of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and daughters and sons who find it unacceptable that thousands die each day as a result of lack of one simple thing: clean water. We are distraught that women and children walk three hours one way to fill a bucket with dirty water…water that may quench a deep thirst, but may also kill them. We are pained that 4,500 hundred children die each day as a result of the lack of clean water in their community. We are anguished that 1.1 billion people walking this planet do not have clean water…while we have so much.
We’re moving loudly and boldly with our bodies and our hearts. We are calling attention to a cause and trying to raise ten billion dollars along the way.
Ten billion dollars and the world has clean water. Americans spend around 450 billion dollars each Christmas. Ten billion dollars and the world has clean water. We believe this can be done.
Join us. Check out charity: water. (Follow the link or click the "Water for Christmas" button on the right.) Donate under the "Water for Christmas" tab at the bottom. Every last penny will go toward the building of a well in a community that doesn’t have one.
Watch our passion as we dance for water. Dancing for water and watching the ripples.
(These videos are posted in good faith. Please read about charity: water and consider making a donation before you view. Every dollar helps build wells in places thirsty for clean water.)
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Janet -- Moline, IL
I am a child of the '80s. I came of age when U2's Bono was waiving his white flag onstage at Live Aid, the 1985 worldwide effort for famine relief in Ethiopia. That effort and others throughout the '80s were so big that people eventually tuned out. Instinctively, Bono knew that, and his efforts grew quieter and even more effective.
I was lucky enough to ask Bono himself about this change in the tone of his activism when I interviewed him in 2002 at Davenport Central High School in Davenport, Iowa. He told me that people get tired of listening when you scream at them. And that's what is so wonderful about this grassroots effort to bring clean drinking water to people who have no access to this most basic of human needs. I think Bono would approve of the goofy hook of dancing. It gets people excited about a huge problem without screaming at them.
With my intense love of U2's music, you'd think that I would have picked one of their songs to dance to. But, being a child of the '80s, I chose one of my favorite one-hit wonders, Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance." Anything by U2 would have required actual dance moves, but "The Safety Dance" was, well, safe. But I still did it because I believe this effort is important and needed.
"You are more powerful than you think, and we can be even more powerful together," Bono said during his Davenport visit. He is right, so I will dance.
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