WATER is a precious commodity as Geoff Litterick and Clare Ollerenshaw will testify.
The respective Kenilworth and Leamington residents paseds the message on to revellers at the Glastonbury Festival where they volunteered for WaterAid, one of the festival’s official charity partners.
Geoff and Clare helped gather tens of thousands of petition signatures for WaterAid’s summer campaign #TheWaterFight, which calls on the UK government to make sure that all government plans for schools globally include taps and toilets for every child.
Geoff and Clare were part of an army of just under 500 WaterAid volunteers making a splash on Worthy Farm. While others were bopping to Ed Sheeran and rocking to Radiohead, Geoff was refilling water bottles and raising awareness of WaterAid at their main stand and Clare was working on the she pees (female urinals).
Clare said: “There was such a good atmosphere at Glastonbury and it was great to be part of the WaterAid team and get to enjoy the music too! Toilets and taps are never far from peoples minds at Glastonbury, so it’s a great opportunity to get them thinking about the one in ten people around the world that don’t have access to safe water.”
Without home comforts – whether queuing to get a drink, waiting to use the toilet, or not being as clean as they’d like to be – festival-goers started to understand what it’s like for more than 650 million people living without clean water and the 2.4 billion people with nowhere safe to go to the toilet.
Globally, around one in three schools do not have clean water or decent toilets. Without water and toilets, children get sick, miss lessons, or can’t concentrate in class. Girls drop out when their periods start. #TheWaterFight aims to change this by making clean water and decent toilets normal for every child. The petition will be handed over to the Government in September.
As well as campaigning, WaterAid volunteers handed out drinking water to festival-goers, collected rubbish for recycling, manned the toilets, as well as helped manage the pilot scheme to introduce reusable stainless steel cups. Each WaterAid volunteer worked shifts of four to six hours a day – the same amount of time many in the developing world spend collecting water, leaving little time for education.
Visit www.wateraid.org/uk/TheWaterFight for further details.
Geoff and Clare are part of a local WaterAid fundraising group. Email [email protected] for further details.
