Bracelets

World Water Week

My family visited Siem Reap, Cambodia last year and visited the staggeringly beautiful temples of Angkor Wat, awesome sights I never imagined I'd see in this lifetime. Our guide Sothy had the glowing inner peace we saw in so many Buddhists on our trip, despite the horrors he and his countrymen had suffered under the Khmer Rouge. Traveling in Buddhist countries put our western lifestyle in a new perspective for me, and I still reflect on the remarkable calm and kindness of the people we met in Cambodia and Thailand.

But the people of Siem Reap are crushingly poor.

Sothy took my family on a boat trip on a large lake from which we were able to observe a village in the course of its everyday life. We saw the residents washing their clothes on the rocks beside the lake, cooking in their open-air huts and going about their humble business, all with water dipped from the lake which also carried human waste. Both their humanity and their poverty affected us deeply and we came away asking Sothy how an outsider could help his much-abused country.

Most of their physical problems stemmed from poor sanitation, he explained, and a pump in a village could bring hygiene, safer food and improved health. When a village got a water pump, diarrhea dropped almost to zero and child death rates plummeted.

A pump in a village allowed the children, especially girls, to go to school instead of spending their days carrying water from the nearest river. Families could grow gardens and sometimes establish small businesses. My wife,...

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