‘Turn on the Tap’ Harvest Project. 2008

Our Harvest Project this year is ‘Turn on the Tap’, a project helping to provide safe accessible water supplies for people living in the developing world. Through a range of solutions from hand dug wells, water filters and boreholes to health and hygiene education, we will be providing safe, clean water and helping to break the grip of poverty on local communities. Families will get safe water to drink. Communities will have improved health and sanitation. Children who would otherwise spend their day fetching water will be able to go to school. And lives will be saved.

‘Turn on the Tap’ is run by the charity Samaritan’s Purse. Samaritan’s Purse is a non-profit, Christian organisation, which provides church support, emergency relief and development assistance to suffering people around the world. In all their activities they aim to provide hope to communities in desperate need, and through this to show God’s love and compassion in many real and practical ways. We have worked with them in the past. Samaritan’s Purse is the charity that we help at Christmas through the shoebox appeal.

Every year nearly two million people die from diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation, and 90% of those are children under the age of five. One sixth of the world’s population, mostly living in Africa and Asia, do not have access to a safe water supply. And many thousands of people have to walk for miles to get any water at all.

We are fortunate to have easy access to a safe water supply in our homes. All we need to do is turn on the tap. Our project ‘Turn on the Tap’ will help to give access to water for many people like us who live in other parts of the world who do not enjoy the same privileges that we do.

Samaritan’s Purse is working to provide safe water supplies in African communities in a number of ways:

1.                   Through the provision of hand dug wells. These simple wells are lined to help protect the water and a hand pump is fitted for ease of access.

2.                   Some communities have boreholes that have fallen into disrepair. Samaritan’s Purse is repairing non-functioning boreholes and training local communities to look after them themselves.

3.                   Springs are places where water that has been filtered through soil and rock reappears from underground. This water is often therefore safe to drink. Samaritan’s Purse is helping to protect springs – building a protective catchment area around them and providing a tap for people to draw the water – thus protecting the water from contamination by animals or human waste.

4.                   Samaritan’s Purse is providing BioSand Water Filters to families who have access to water, but where the water is not safe to drink. These filters are made from local materials and use a process called ‘slow sand filtration’ to filter out dirt and kill bacteria.

Samaritan’s Purse is also training local educators to teach people about how to use water safely. This includes ways of obtaining and storing safe water, how to dispose of waste, and the importance of hand-washing and hygienic food handling.

Through our support of ‘Turn on the Tap’ we can make a difference. £5 could help someone have access to a hand dug well with a hand pump. £15 could help a family have access to a borehole. £25 could help protect a spring and provide a family with safe water. And £40 could provide a family with a water filter.

Supplied by Hutton and Shenfield Union Church