A welcome drop in the ocean

Can you imagine being unable to reach for a glass of cold water on a hot day? Having to walk miles just to a river and back to fill a pot with dirty water to quench your thirst? And as a dad, it’s unbearable to think that giving my child river water to drink will make them sick.

This is so far removed from our life here in the UK. The sewage scandal and claims of water companies putting profits over aging infrastructure rumble on. Yet most people in Britain are happy enough to drink tap water.

It's World Water Day tomorrow. A day to focus on the 2.2 billion people the World Health Organization and UNICEF say lack safe drinking water. That's more than one in four people in our world. A shocking statistic.

The WHO states a million people die each year from unsafe water and sanitation. A million lives that could, and should, be saved with the right investment. Every one is a real person. An individual who is precious. A mum, a brother, a child. Yet, at the end of the day, simply another person dealt a bad hand in life's circumstances. It's just so wrong.

It's no coincidence that the very last indigenous case of leprosy was recorded in the UK in 1798. This followed a time when great strides were made in public health. Piped water was introduced to London in 1613, an era when leprosy was rife and deeply feared.

Poor sanitation weakens immune systems and the ability to fight disease. We now don't associate leprosy with being a UK disease. But it is only thanks to an overhaul in sanitation and living conditions that it was wiped from our shores.

If we can rid the UK of diseases like leprosy by improving sanitation, then surely we should be doing the same overseas?

Our team discovered a stark reality behind Sri Lanka's beautiful palm-tree lined beaches. The toll of neglect after a 25-year civil conflict saw people living without clean water. Unsurprisingly, leprosy rates were sky high.

It always raises a red flag to our teams when a large number of children are found to have leprosy. This is because the bacterium causing leprosy is notoriously slow growing. So the disease must be highly active in a community for a young child to show symptoms. This is exactly what we found in pockets of North and Eastern Sri Lanka.

I have been privileged to meet people like Yathurshika (pictured) in these hidden communities of Sri Lanka. This 16-year-old’s leprosy has been cured thanks to the compassion of people in the UK. And happily, we have been able to provide Yathurshika and her family with a water well and a toilet.

By the end of 2025, we will have supported the creation of 200 wells in Sri Lanka. With an average of five people in a household and four households using a well, this has a huge ripple effect!

Walking even a short distance to a well to fetch water is something alien to us in the UK. Yet being able to access a safe water supply has had a huge knock-on effect on Yathurshika's family life.

It now seems surreal when we see old footage on the news of people collecting water from standpipes. Yet I remember the heatwave of 1976 so well. I was sick with meningitis at the time and was off school for several weeks. My poor mum, a single parent, was juggling a full-time job and bringing up two children. Yet she went to the standpipe in our street to collect the water we needed each day.

It's hard to think of this as being an almost luxurious situation. But for the people we serve in Asia and Africa it really is. With the burden of water collection usually falling on girls, having a safe local water supply can allow them to go to school. It paves the way to both healthy and brighter futures!

The scale of the need for safe drinking water globally is vast. And as Mother Teresa famously said, we often feel like what we're doing is just a drop in the ocean. But having spent time with families like Yathurshika's, we know the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

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