07 Sep Access To Clean Water Means I Can Go To School!

Growing up as a teenage girl in Kenya is not easy. If a girl is in school, her many chores and responsibilities likely take up any time not spent in class or doing homework. If a girl is not in school, she is often married, sometimes even raising her own children.

Hadiya is 16. When she’s not in school, she cooks, cleans, fetches water and helps wash her family’s clothes. Before Unstoppable Foundation started working in her community of Pimbiniet, in Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, girls like Hadiya walked many miles, many times a day, to a dirty river to collect the water needed by the family for cleaning, washing, cooking and drinking.

Sadly, because the water source was so far away, and because collecting water is traditionally the job of a female, many girls didn’t have time to go to school and would spend hours lugging jugs of brown water on their backs instead of seated at a desk, in a classroom, learning. On top of that, the water that they carried was dirty and unhealthy, causing illness and disease.

Hadiya is happy to say that she now spends only one hour each day collecting water with her mother. The borehold drilled with the help of Unstoppable Foundation in Pimbiniet is not only close but clean, providing families like Hadiya’s with a source of water that is hygenic and safe to use for cooking, cleaning and most importantly, drinking.

Now, Hadiya not only spends less time carrying water, she spends more time in school, studying and time to be with her friends.  Her favorite subject is Kiswahili because she loves reading story books. When she grows up, Hadiya hopes to be a nurse and hopes to be married to “an educated, handsome Kipsigi boy–but only after I finish school.”

With love and appreciation,

Cynthia Kersey

Bestselling author, “Unstoppable”
www.unstoppable.net
Chief Humanitarian Officer
Unstoppable Foundation
www.UnstoppableFoundation.org