Safely returned home

Hello to you all!

Safely back from the Central African Republic after 8 days of travelling through a very big (as big as France) and shockingly poor country.The waterproblem I went there for, was even more visible than I had expected. Not alone visible but sensible as well.Even I (well fed, rich and pretty happy Western Red Cross 3fm guy :-) had some trouble in getting clear and drinkable water so I shared water from a natural spring with a whole village and that was sooooo great.The spring had just been delivered and opened by the Red Cross delegation and the village was more than thrilled.By sharing water with them, I felt a bit of that happiness...It was a welcome feeling after several days of watching painful poverty,life threatning diseases,parasites and extremely sad and worried people who had less than nothing.All scared and waiting for the dry season to come, when all the wells will be dried out and disease and thirst will make them bury their children...Because that is daily life reality in big parts of Central Africa.

The work of the Red Cross is really directly life saving in that region.It's fairly cheap to create solutions to polluted water. It's fairly easy and cheap to preserve natural springs and educate people to operate the waterpumps and give them the knowledge and spare parts to maintain them.It's even cheaper and easier to educate people on how not to pollute your own clear drinking water by keeping the water in clean buckets and bottles, and by making latrines (toilets) so that feaces from the bush won't flood into the wells when it rains.

And even though all that is fairly cheap...it will take a shitload of money to make the whole country profit of all these simple solutions.Because it's so big...Because there are practically no roads to get to the smallest and poorest small villages.Because Central African Republic is not the only country that suffers from these problems.It concerns 1.2 billion people worldwide.

A shitload of money for the Red Cross so they can continue the good work and get to more and isolated places than they do now.But that's December...That's the Glass House.That's your responsibility isn't it? :-)

This was my trip.This is my story.This makes me think.This makes me act.

Thanks for your warm support.