As a country, the United States wastes more water than any other country in the world.  We are spoiled; we take almost everything for granted, most especially water. San Francisco’s tap water comes from Yosemite National Park and is so clean, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not require it to be filtered. A bottle of Evian water at $1.35 could be refilled with San Francisco tap water once a day for over ten years before the cost would total $1.35. If tap water cost the same as the cheapest bottle, monthly water bills would come to about $9,000.

With all the talk of water at school last week, I have promised myself to conserve water and overall make better choices for both myself and the environment. In my Prayer and Spirituality class, taught by Mrs. Lorentz, I realized how easy it actually is to help out. Mrs. Lorentz is in contact with one of the Lasallian sister schools in Nairobi, and she is an advocate for clean drinking water. Twenty-five cents alone can sustain one person for a whole month; that’s four months for one dollar, and a measly three dollars for an entire year.

If everyone in the SHCP community donated only three dollars to Africa, we would be able to sustain hundreds of people with clean, safe drinking water for a whole year.  In addition to helping those in Africa, we can better ourselves by avoiding plastic bottles at all costs. While the environment suffers, the economy strives. Americans pitch 38 billion water bottles a year into landfills.  That’s 167 bottles per person. Americans also spend over 15 billion dollars each year on bottled water.  Now, imagine if just a quarter of all that money was sent to Africa.  We would live in a world where people would not have to worry about where they would get their next drink of water, or if they would eventually die of starvation.

**Statistics taken from Drop the Pop Campaign (No author or publication notes to cite)