By Madison White Franks
The seventh annual Walk for Water at Grace Episcopal Church is slated for Saturday, October 14.
This event supports Water Missions International which is a Christian engineering ministry that aims to provide sustainable safe water solutions, said Walk for Water representative Glenn Cockrell.
Egette Indelele recently visited Grace Church to explain the importance of the Water Mission effort. Born in Tanzania, she experienced the turmoil bad water causes in Third World countries.
“Where I was living in Tanzania, we had to walk to get water and we would get sick. The only way we could filter the water was to boil it and wait for it to cool to drink it, but even then, we still got sick,” said Indelele.
When war broke out in Tanzania, she and her family moved to a refugee camp in Kenya. There were a lot of people in the camp and resources were limited, she said.
“The water was always dirty. A lot of people died because of that,” she said. “The water wasn’t clean or filtered. The workers that were there didn’t have time to clean it because there were a lot of people.”
Indelele spent two years in a refugee camp and was selected to move from Kenya to New York and then to Salem and Roanoke.
“I really admire what Glenn is doing. It’s so amazing especially with what is going on right now with the floods in Sierra Leone,” she said.
Indelele is now a freshman at George Mason University studying psychology.
Registration for the 2017 Walk for Water will begin at 9 a.m. at Grace Episcopal Church, 303 South Main Street, Kilmarnock.
For a $10 contribution, participants will experience what the women and children in Third World countries do several times a day by carrying a bucket from Grace Church down Waverly Avenue to the Chesapeake Boat Basin, fill it with water and walk back, said Cockrell.
“Your funding, through either method, will be spread through every bolt, clamp, hose, solar panel and filter in a Living Water Sustainable Treatment System that will purify up to 10,000 gallons of highly contaminated, disease-laden water daily, serving 5,000 plus people, especially women and children, for many years to come,” said Cockrell.
Anyone unable to make the 3.5-mile walk may support the effort with a donation payable to Water Mission. Mail the donation to Glenn Cockrell, P.O. Box 125, Irvington, VA 22480.
Sunday, October 15, is the rain date for the walk.
