Excerpt from charity: water blog by Mo Scarpelli:

Mintamir, 18 years old, is one of them. Like a lot of the farm kids from my hometown in rural Michigan, she’s been handling chores since she was old enough to walk. When these chores were taken care of, only then would she get to school.

But unlike most farm kids in the U.S., of all her responsibilities, the most time-consuming and physically difficult was collecting water. She’d spend much of her morning walking to an open pond, then hauling her Jerry can home to her house. Her family would make the most of just a pair of these five-gallon containers of water each day. That meant only enough water to bathe (at most) once a week and wash clothes every two weeks.

“We didn’t even wash our faces or care for our personal hygiene,” she tells me. “We were ashamed of our body odor. But also, we’d get sick and then we didn’t focus on school. We’d be tired and sleepy.”

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