Water Conservation in Action

Another idea for how you can be globally mindful?

Blood:Water Mission is sponsoring a Forty Days of Water challenge.

They are challenging you to only drink water during Lent (Mar 9-Apr 23) and donate the money you save on other drinks to help build wells in Africa.

For us, that's when we go to Chick-fil-A, or out to eat. Could I manage to give up my morning coffee (even if it is decaf?)

Even if we decided to give $.25 or $.50 per drink every time we are eating out (since we normally get water anyway). Blood:Water says that it only takes $1 to give an African water for an entire year. $1.

Are you ready to do something?

Post a comment and let me know if you want to participate.

Water Conservation comes Home

In our house, we looked at our water bill and noted that in January, we used 206.3 gallons on average per day. Can we reduce that?

Here are 100 ideas for ways you can conservate water in your house. We are trying some of these and will let you know how we do this month!

Here are 5 quick ways that we are saving water:

1. Put the stopper closed when filling the tub for the kids.

2. Use the power of soaking dishes. A little water and 30 minutes can do wonders for cleaning dishes.

3. Stop the running water. Everywhere. We try not to let the water run. At all. Whether its washing hands, or washing dishes. You would be amazed at how much water goes just right down the sink.

4. Light load features on our clothes washer and dish washer get our clothes and dishes just as clean and take half the time and use half the water.

5. Reuse water that has been used. Especially when it comes to things like soaking, the water doesn't have to be perfectly clean to soak, since its a dish already dirty. So, if I have leftover pasta water, I'll pour that into a pot that needs to soak. The hot water breaks up the gunk and I've not used any extra water.

HERE are more ideas ....

Another idea? (To be continued)

Water Conservation

Global Mindfulness in Action:

Fast Facts from World Vision

• Every 21 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness.
• More than 2.7 billion people have inadequate or nonexistent access to proper sanitation.
• When a community gains access to clean water, its child mortality rate drops by half.

Something very simple for us here in America. Water is prolific. Cheap. Easy. You turn the faucet and water comes out. No questions asked. No walk. No bucket to get it to our house.

Watch this video from World Vision and it will remind you that for many in the world, it is not so.

So ...what can we do?

(To be continued)

Global Mindfulness

One of the priorities of both our family, and Lanham Academy (our homeschool) is global mindfulness.

What does "global mindfulness" mean?

We want to be aware of what is going on in the rest of the world.

We want to follow missionaries. Pray for them. Support them financially. We want to encourage them in any way that we can.

We want to be aware of situations around the world that reflect the hand of God at work. All you need to do is look at the Middle East right now and know that there is a lot going on.

We also want to be aware of how our choices affect the world at large. How does American consumerism affect the poor in Africa? How does my use of water here in Raleigh affect others? Where are others suffering? What can I do?

We want to draw our children out of their own little world into the bigger picture of what the Lord is doing. And in so doing, change a little piece of both our world and maybe somewhere else in the process.