Water Wonderland

Over the very eventful weekend, I got sick.

I'm almost positive it is a simple cold, but it still sucks.

Anyway, while I have been sick I find myself doing a lot of things that use water. I wash my hands almost twice as much, I take long hot showers to help my congestion, and I drink hot tea.

This got me thinking about how much water and health go hand in hand. How healthy can anyone be if they don't have access to water, let alone clean water? How much water does a hospital use? Could a hospital, urgent care, or doctor's office survive one day without clean water?

Probably not.

This got me thinking about countries who don't have clean water. What are their surgical success rates like, and are they at all correlated to clean water resources? I can't imagine having surgery done by a surgeon who hadn't washed their hands all day, let alone scrubbed in less than a minute before. The thought scares me. What kind of bacteria could be lurking?

We have access to 24/7 clean water. And when the water gets shut off for a multitude of reasons; we freak out.

Case in point: I am a Floridian. As a born-and-raised Floridian, hurricane season is something you prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. In 2005, Hurricane Charlie hit. There were trees trapping people in their neighborhoods, power outages, and some water shortages. We were without power, (including AC in the sweltering heat) for days. We all could manage, until my mom turned on the sink and no water came out. We packed up the car and headed to a hotel with generators.

People don't know how to cope without something they have always had until they don't have it anymore. Humans have to have water to live.

As I have previously stated, I am from Florida. That being said, I had no idea that most of the country, and much of the world, was in significant drought. Where I am from, you can't have basements because underground is full of water. We have lakes galore and a working water reclamation program. We have actual "water parks" and giant rides that use thousands of gallons of water a day to push a boat down a river. There is a fountain at the beginning of every neighborhood and mall entrance. Droughts were a foreign concept to me before this class.

Now I understand that a drought is an international problem that affects everyone. We need to work together to understand and evaluate water resources and ensure that everyone has access to clean water.

This may seem like an impossible dream, getting everyone in the world on the same side of one issue, but dreaming big is where true successes stem from.