Our Mission
Our Mission
Here at Break the Cycle of Hunger.org our single and only mission is to provide clean safe water to regions of the world that have never had access to it.
Sadly, what happens most frequently is that the daily burred of fetching water falls on the women and girls of the household, while the men go to work, and the boys go to school. I have personally witnessed this 1,000s of times.
This is my honest account to an average day and life of a African family living in a remote rural area. An average day begins close to early sunrise where the mother and her daughter start the hour plus walk, carrying the empty yellow five-gallon containers to the local water pump or river/stream.
Because the pump is normally locked at night by a village administer or village elder, the women use the honor system of placing their containers in a long straight line. It is not uncommon by 7:00 am to count 100 to 150 yellow containers and more coming every minute. This is followed by the long wait for the man holding the key to come and unlock the water pump.
The sad reality is that he might show up or he might not. I have seen countless days where these hundreds of women and girls have waited all day in the hot scorching African sun, in the rainy season out in the pouring rain all day and long into the darkness waiting for the gate keeper to come and often never does.
Then they leave the containers right where they are hoping tomorrow will be a better day. Let’s say the next day comes and the man with the key finally gets there by 1:00pm to unlock the pump. Do you know how long a slow running hand pump fills a yellow five-gallon container?
The answer is seven to ten minutes. Imagine if you are the 50th or 150th in line and it’s becoming pitch black (there are no streetlights in rural Africa). Then imagine carrying two five-gallon water containers weighing 41 pounds each, that’s a heavy 82 pounds. If you’re a 9-year-old girl and you have an hour walk ahead of you back home in the darkest of dark nights, it’s no fun.
Then she must worry about poisonous snakes on the path or the wild animals, but the worst of all fears and most commonly is the man waiting in the bushes to attack and rape her and her mother.