by | January 23, 2012

Thirst for change: Rachel’s water challenge

Rachel begins her water challengeFrom Sunday 22nd January until Saturday 28thJanuary, I will be undertaking a Water Challenge. I will try to survive, for one week, on 10 litres of water each day.

In Europe we use, on average, 200 litres of water per day – and because of the long showers I like to take I probably use a lot more. 10 litres is the amount on which many of those living in water poverty must survive on a daily basis.

The World Health Organisation recommends access to at least 20 litres of water per day that is from a safe source (in other words, protected from outside contamination) within 1km distance of your home.

What began as a light-hearted suggestion to kick-start our Thirst for Change campaign in Hallam will soon be turning into a week of a very different reality for me.

Email the Prime Minister to turn the tide on water poverty>>

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by | January 6, 2012

What lit your flame?

What lit your flame?

As we begin to mark our 50th anniversary year at CAFOD, it is a time to reflect on what we have achieved, and how we have fulfilled our mission, both as an organisation and as individuals. In that spirit of reflection, we are asking all staff, volunteers, supporters and other friends of CAFOD to look back over their lives and recall the moment when they were first drawn into the fight against poverty and injustice.

Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero

Archbishop of San Salvador and human rights campaigner Oscar Romero (b.1917, murdered March 1980). During the 1980s, El Salvador was ravaged by civil war which in 1992 was ended with a United Nations-brokered peace agreement. c Equipo Maiz

For many of us, it was a news broadcast, a photo, a speech or an inspirational person. For some, it was a film, book or a story from the Bible. And for others, it was the personal experience of taking a trip abroad or seeing the kindness of others first hand. The events, experiences and people which have inspired us are as diverse as we are, but we can recognise in each others’ testimonies common bonds: the awakening of compassion for others; and the discovery of a world outside our own.

So please share with us your stories, and let us share them with the wider community of CAFOD supporters and partners throughout the world. Whatever age we are, whatever background we come from, and however different our stories are, we are united by our fire for justice. So let us share that fire, and celebrate our unity. To tell us what lit your flame, please email: flame@cafod.org.uk or leave your own story as a comment below.

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by | January 11, 2012

Haiti: applaud the successes

Sarah Marsh is our Programme Officer for Haiti.

Haiti two years on: our response>>

“Rubble still lines the street of Port au Prince”, “people are still living in tents”, “millions of dollars of aid funding are still unspent”, “the response is too slow” – all tag lines that we have become used to hearing since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. It’s time for the commentators to take a step back and break it down to the bones of what really happened.

Disaster – check.

Crisis – check.

Emergency – check.

Disease – check.

Political failure  – check.

Civil unrest – check.

Death – check.

Not many countries in the world have been hit as badly as Haiti in the past two years. The country has had multiple emergencies in less than 24 months. Not only has it endured its worst disaster since Independence, it is struggling with the immense task of controlling the now-endemic outbreak of cholera across a country that has little or no sanitation, along with devastating storms and outbreaks of violence and civil unrest.

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by | January 27, 2012

Rachel’s water challenge: day four

Rachel - Too much detergentWell, thank goodness for my ‘leftovers’! My washing basket was in serious danger of overflow, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a clothes wash. But I would never have managed it on my daily allowance alone.

I had to use what remained of my water allowance for the day, plus several litres of water saved from previous days.

I tried to remember the technique I perfected while I lived in India – soak, soap, scrub, rinse – but at the project where I lived the issue, for the most part, was a lack of washing machine, not a lack of water, so I was not concerned with also trying to conserve the used water for flushing the toilet.

It took 1 ½ hours and about 9 litres of water to wash my clothes by hand, and that was on a load about a third of the size I would normally cram into the washing machine.

Email the PM to call for clean water and safe sanitation for all>> Continue reading →

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by | January 26, 2012

Rachel’s water challenge: day three

 

Rachel's water challengeAnyone who has ever lived with me knows that I like to take my time in the bathroom in the morning.

On average, I’d say I spend about ten minutes in the shower each day. I don’t know why it takes me so long: I don’t do anything unusual in there and I’ve tried to be quicker but I just can’t manage it.

So a quick calculation – 9 litres of water for every minute spent in the shower – reveals that I use an astonishing 90 litres of water each morning before I’ve even had my breakfast.

Email the PM to call for clean water and safe sanitation >>

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by | January 24, 2012

Rachel’s water challenge: day two

Rachel's Water Challenge: Day 2Whenever I’ve told anyone that I’m doing this challenge, without fail they have asked me “What are you going to do about flushing the toilet?” Good question. It’s the one part of this challenge which I’m really going to struggle with, if not fail entirely.

Email the PM to call for safe water and sanitation for all >>

Yesterday, even after repeating ‘Don’t flush, don’t flush’ to myself whilst sitting on the toilet, out of a habit drilled into me since childhood I realised too late that I had.

To try and avoid this happening again I have stuck a bright pink post-it note reading “Do you really need to flush??” on top of the cistern, which will hopefully stop my hand as it instinctively reaches to the flush buttons. Continue reading →

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by | January 23, 2012

Rachel’s water challenge: day one

Rachel's water challenge - day oneSo, I think I’ll have to consider today as a dry run (excuse the pun) for the rest of the week.

During the course of the day I’ve had a couple of realisations regarding the practicalities of this challenge:

>> Rachel’s water challenge: The why and the how

  -   Firstly, being in an environment that is not my own (e.g. someone else’s house) makes it impossible to save and recycle my waste water, and requires me to be sanitary for the sake of others.

-   Second, I need to have not only my collection bottles to hand for measuring my water, but other vessels too: for mixing hot and cold water, for storing waste water, for pouring water over myself… I’ll also need to leave bottles of water in the different places I would normally use water, i.e. the bathroom and the kitchen, to save me from either making endless trips up and down my steep, Victorian-era stairs, or making instinctive moves towards the tap.

-   Third, am I really going to boil the kettle every time I go to the toilet in order to wash my hands with warm water? Probably not, so I face a week of washing my hands in cold water and hoping that the soap suds alone will be enough to wash away the germs. Continue reading →

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