When I decided to make this month a month of causes that I felt were important to support, I had no idea of the journey that I would be taking. I have projects that I absolutely want to share with you, but I wanted to emphasize certain things during each of the weeks of March. This first week, I wanted to highlight projects that deal with racial equity. A lot of lower income, black, and Latinx communities are at a disadvantage when it comes to opportunities. During the pandemic I read story after story about food deserts in nominally black neighborhoods. I learned a lot about mutual aid societies, and I was grateful that I didn't need to know those things to survive. But if I were in a different situation--and one that isn't so difficult to imagine, I might well have been relying on that information just to make it through the day.
The amount of insecurity in this country is staggering--food insecurity, water insecurity, health insecurity, housing insecurity, emergency fund insecurity, education and educational resources insecurity.... For a place that touts itself as a land of plenty, there is a lot of famine to be found. And while I am heartened when I read stories about people elevating themselves out of these situations, it makes me rather angry to know that this stuff still exists in the year 2021.
When I was a kid, I believed that we'd have tackled some of these issues and made them better by now, but when I look around now, some forty years later and find myself confronting the same problems and the same inequities as back then, I have to wonder if the way we're running our societies is somehow flawed and wrong. So when I came upon this charity and read what they had to say, I knew that I needed to make sure it was included during this week's Causes to Celebrate.
DigDeep is a non-profit dedicated to bringing running water to the people of America. They believe in finding solutions to our water problems, and they did the research to not only prove that there was a problem, but also offered us the means by which to fix it. Let me just share a few quotes from their page here:
Black and Latinx households are twice as likely as white households to lack indoor plumbing.
Federal funding for water is only 14% of what it was in 1977.
Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing.
The number of people without water access recently increased in Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico.
More than 2.2 million Americans still don’t have running water or basic plumbing, like a flush toilet. 44 million more don’t have clean water that’s safe to drink.
Their latest report was concluded in 2019 and has been posted on their site.
It is staggering to me that the things I take for granted every day--running water from my sink and bathtub, water to flush the toilet, to wash my clothes, and to clean my dishes; is something that people here in America still go without. I've donated to charities committed to bringing water to other countries like Africa, but DigDeep's assertions hit me pretty hard.
I watched one of their videos about the 4 liter challenge, and I have to say that the idea of trying to live on only 4 liters of water every day seems daunting. That there are people in this country having to do that every day--not just for one day, leaves me feeling dispirited. No one should have to live without running water, but especially not here in America. And so that is why, today, I am celebrating DigDeep's mission to bring running water to every home here in America (whatever home may be.)
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