Why I became passionate about SDG6

I have been asked several times by those who know me personally, "Why are you always sharing posts about water conservation and drinking water?", and I have decided that as it is Water Action Month, now would be the best time to share.

Me in Rajasthan using Filtered Bottle

Before I volunteered in India for three months, I didn't really pay attention to global issues in relation to safe water, or knew much about water conservation. Since I was a child, I have done one of the main ways to conserve water in the household - turning faucets off when not using them. Despite this, I cannot recall making any more effort than that to conserve water. I knew that when I applied to volunteer in India for three months with International Citizen Service in conjunction with Pravah, my water consumption would be drastically lowered due to living in a country that has a scarcity of safe water. This didn't scare me though, as I was ready for the challenge and quite excited to live in a different culture and lifestyle.

I always knew that a lack of safe water was an issue as I'd seen a plethora of different adverts on TV and social media over the years, but I never quite believed, or fully registered that it was an actual problem, affecting millions of real people across the globe. I think from my sheltered lifestyle in the UK, I made myself ignorant to the water crisis as I had never been a victim of water scarcity and had, and still have, "unlimited" access to clean and safe water at the turn of a tap.

Clean drinking water in a bottle

So when did I become so passionate about the Sustainable Development Goal number 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation? - around about the time I saw my host mother, Puspa Ji, carry around 10 litres of clean drinking water on her shoulder after extracting this water from a well.

In India, there are different levels of water poverty, and this usually works hand in hand with all other types of poverty. Richer families in the village I volunteered in in Rajasthan, Kotri, could afford to have tanks of clean drinking water delivered to there homes, and this water would be used in their everyday lives. However, for families with less money who could not afford the same luxury, most had to resort to drinking salt water or dirty water - both of which are bad for your health.

Those who lived in poverty tended not to have a toilet, good access to safe water, and as a repercussion faced more health risks. Luckily, a lot of families in the village of Kotri were getting toilets fit into their homes. This was an amazing step as many had to carry a bottle of water to a field to do their business, without privacy or facilities to wash their hands after. This is one of the reasons I became passionate about SDG6, because it made me realise that water conservation wasn't the only solution to the problem, as the problem was a lot bigger than just having water. Sanitation is intricately linked to safe water, and both are needed for people to lead a healthier lifestyle.

The toilet in my host home that I used for three months

I started to feel more empathetic and opened myself up more to how big the water crisis actually was after sitting and talking with a family in Kotri, and being offered a cup of chai made with salt water. It made me incredibly sad to think that whilst I had lived my whole life drinking clean water from the tap in my kitchen, there was millions of families that really did have to resort to drinking water that was not good for their health, just to survive.

Another thing that I became increasingly aware about during my time in India, was how to use water effectively. I can say truthfully that one of my fears about coming back home to the UK was coming back to a life where it was normal to use excessive amounts of water in our daily lives. This, however was a lesson that I learned very close to the end of my three months in India. I realised just how privileged I was, and if I wanted to see change, I'd have to be involved in it.

5 litres per day Water Challenge

Once I got back to the UK, I was unsure of how to start raising awareness of the problems that I had seen in India, so I started by changing my lifestyle. I have religiously lived by having a strict 5 minute shower or showering from a bucket, I have started to hand wash my clothes more and never wash clothes until their is a full load, and I have started to use water more effectively. I decided to follow a lot of Water-related groups on my social media, and to research more about the water crisis.

As a result of this, I decided to do a Water Challenge where I lived on 5 litres of water per day to highlight the issues of living on a limited amount of water. (You can find my experiences on my social media or read my earlier blog posts), and a video with some other ICS volunteers on taking shorter showers to conserve water - this can be found on my personal Facebook, for those that know me. I have decided to support Care International by joining in their Walk In Her Shoes campaign which is to raise money to build water pumps and wells in places across the globe to make water and education more accessible for those it effects. I have decided to support End Water Poverty by supporting their WASH campaign, which stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. I have decided to share multiple posts to educate about the water crisis, among other exciting things.

Access to water and education

So, my reasons for sharing posts about water conservation and becoming more actively involved is this: I am passionate about it. I want to share posts about the main issue that I want to tackle. I want to raise awareness of the water crisis in hope that maybe I will turn a few heads of those I interact with on social media, and so that they will start to think about the problem at hand and help to fight it. I want people to hear my voice when I speak out.

I want to use this time to call on my friends to think about Clean Water and Sanitation. I want to encourage others to be passionate about the Sustainable Development Goals, as they benefit everyone.

Goal number 6 in the Sustainable Development Goals, in my opinion, is one of the most important goals out of the 17 because Clean Water and Sanitation (Goal 6) is an integral part of life, with water being one of the most basic human rights. Without safe water, many of the goals including environment, health, equality, will not be as effectively reached.

Without my ICS experience in India, I do not think that I would be as passionate about something so important, and I do not think that I would be confident enough to write about my personal experiences which led me posting about Water Conservation. I am going to continue volunteering with charities to raise awareness and money for water-related projects, and posting a lot of water-related articles on my social media. Truthfully, being exposed to the water crisis in India has changed my life path, and I can only thank ICS and Pravah for giving me the opportunity to find something that I think is worth fighting for. So far I have done only grass root level activism via challenges, writing blog posts and raising awareness through social media - but every little step counts.

As I was one told, we are all just a drop in the ocean, but we have the potential to create a wave.

If you are interested in learning more about anything that I have talked about here - feel free to leave a comment asking me questions, or get in contact with me on my social media. Here are some links that I recommend:

Article -
http://unu.edu/publications/articles/water-will-transform-world.html

Statistics - http://water.org/water-crisis/water-sanitation-facts/


WaterAid - http://www.wateraid.org/uk/


My Twitter - @hannahmilner78
My Facebook - www.facebook.com/hannahmilnervolunteer
Care International - http://www.careinternational.or.uk/

International Citizen Service- http://www.volunteerics.org/
Sustainable Development Goals - https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

End Water Poverty - http://www.endwaterpoverty.org/
Pravah - http://www.pravah.org/content/ICS

5 Litres a Day - Water Challenge Day 3 and Day 4

Halfway through my 5 litres per day water challenge!


Day three was quite hard as I did not stay at my home on that night, meaning I didn't have access to the resources that I was using.

I didn't have resources such as my bucket to wash my clothes in (or enough time to get them dried before I went back home the next day), or to wash my body with  - so I decided that I would add the 2.5 litres that I would have otherwise used on Wednesday onto Thursday.


Instead of showering on Wednesday, I used a flannel, soap and some of my *very* limited water to clean my body this way. It didn't take up much water and it was a trick I used in India quite a lot when I didn't have time to shower. My hair was okay as I cleaned it on day two. The point of this blog and the challenge was to show exactly how hard it is to live on a very limited amount of water, so although it may seem not very clean at all - even having a flannel and clean water to wash myself down with it is a lot more than thousands of others have.

Using resources available to me

I only had one 1 litre bottle with me which I used for drinking water. As a result of this I had to guess how much water I was using for cooking and hygiene, which wasn't too hard since I had days one and two to judge by. Although I was using water from the tap instead of from my bottles, I was more conscious of how much water was running through the tap because of living out of bottles and having very little water to use.

I relied on using hand sanitiser a lot on day three so that I wouldn't use more water than my limit.


Day four, despite the added 2.5 litres from day three on top of my 5 litres, was actually the hardest day that I endured. This was because I had two lots of clothes to hand wash, and my hair and body to wash. I completely messed up the pattern that I created for myself to be able to *comfortably* live on 5 litres of water per day.

 Washing my body and hair with 3 litres of water wasn't incredibly hard as I had done both separately with 1.5 litres on day one and day two. Due to volunteering in India, and showering out of a bucket for three months, I have gotten quite used to washing myself using only the amount of water that is needed and not more.

hand washing clothes

The most challenging part of day four was washing two days worth of clothes with only 2 litres of water. This was hard, firstly because of the type of clothes I wore which were the type of material which hold a lot of water, and because there was more items to wash.

I used 1 litre to cover the clothes and make sure that they were wet, and then I put in the detergent and let the clothes sit for about 15 minutes. I then used the method that I learned in India to make sure that all the dirt was coming out of my clothes. I then used the other litre to wash the soap out of each piece of clothing separately. Using two litres of water to wash my clothes was incredibly difficult as I was used to using about 10 - 12 litres in India to do the same job. I used some of my "hygiene" water to finish washing my clothes.

The same as with washing my hair, my body, even my dishes - using too much product (in this case detergent) to wash items with will mean that you have to use more water to wash the product out, so I had to be really careful not to use too much detergent to wash my clothes with.

The amount of water I had for drinking and cooking was the same as previous days - enough to get by comfortably.

Here are some tips that I learned on day three and day four:


- If you ever decide to start hand washing clothes, make sure that you wash your clothes everyday so that your clothes do not build up and so that you don't use more water than needed.

- Use a flannel and soap if you don't have time for a shower or if you're not "dirty enough" to have a shower - and remember to have short 5 minute showers to save water!

5 Litres a Day - Water Challenge Day 2

So, I didn't keep quite on track of writing about my 5 Litres a Day water challenge as I would have liked.

Water to wash hair with

People may recall from the post that I wrote for day one, that there was absolutely no way that I could make 1.5 litres of water stretch to wash my body AND hair, so I decided that I would take it in turns and wash my hair one day, shower the next.

So, on day two, I washed my hair by putting my allocated 1.5 litres into my bucket and bending my head over the bath. As you can imagine - this really isn't a very comfortable way to wash your hair at all, especially without the use of a showerhead. It was even easier to shower and wash my hair when I used a bucket and scoop in India because I had way more water to work with.



I had to use 1.5 litres of water to wet my hair, wash it and then condition it so it was a pretty hard task as the more shampoo and conditioner you put onto your hair - the more water it is going to take to get it out. Regardless of this, I managed to complete the task without using anymore water than I had to, and my hair felt better than it had done in months! It felt really smooth and in better condition that when I usually shower and use more water and product.

Personal Hygiene

I did not manage to take many photos mainly just because I forgot - but I also washed my clothes that I'd been wearing that day in 1 litre of water and had no trouble with the amount of water I had to use for drinking and cooking with.

I did manage to be a bit more resourceful with the amount that I used for hygiene after learning from day one (details in Day One post), and ended up having around 100ml left at the end of the day. This might not seem like very much, but it felt like an achievement for me.






Although I haven't went into as much detail for Day Two, here are some tips that I have thought of to use less water when washing your hair:

www.wateruseitwisely.com

- Use less product. It is common sense to not use too much product as it can make your hair oily, but you also then use more water than what is actually needed. So, only use as much product as your hair needs.

- Use a two in one product so that you can use less water due to not having to wash the shampoo out and then apply the conditioner.

- Don't wash your hair everyday unless it's needed. On days that I do not need to wash hair, my showers can last under 4 minutes.

- Turn off the shower head whilst washing your hair, especially if you tend to leave your shampoo/conditioner on for a few minutes.



My posts for the remaining days shall be coming soon - I apologise for not writing them alongside doing the actual challenge.

www.wateruseitwisely.com

5 Litres a Day - Water Challenge Day One

As people may have already seen on my social media, I am doing a challenge that I set myself where I live on 5 litres if water per day for 5 days. This is a variation of the 'Live Below the Line'* challenge that I did as part of my fundraising for my trip to India.

The main aim of the challenge is to not use more than 5 litres of water per day. This means that I have 5 litres of water per day for things such as drinking, cooking, showering, clothes washing and for personal hygiene. I was inspired to do this challenge because once I arrived back into the UK, I realised just how much water I used compared to the amount I used in India, and the bad effects that it had.

My 5 litres of water put into bottles

Whilst living in my host home in Kotri, I used around 30 litres per day to drink, wash, shower with etc. It is said that a person needs a minimum of 20 litres per day to survive.* I decided to challenge myself and live on a quarter of this figure to highlight just how hard it is to live with a scarcity of water.  I put my 5 litres of water into bottles with labels on to help me to keep track of how much water I used for each need and to make sure that I used my water most effectively.


Day one was actually a lot easier for me than I thought it would be - but I do think this is because I got used to not using an abundance of water for three months and it became normality for me. However, not being able to turn a tap and have water flow freely from it was quite difficult. We are extremely lucky in the UK to be able to turn a tap and to have seemingly unlimited water at our expense. Using water from a bottle, on the other hand, for things such as washing my hands and face, was hard because I felt like I was wasting unnecessary water.

Water used for hygiene

After washing my hands, face and brushing my teeth, I had used 500ml from my allocated 1 litre for the day. This worried me a little as I had only 500ml left to wash my hands several times throughout the day, and to wash my hand and brush my teeth at the end of the day. Luckily for me, I managed to do it with the help of having adequate resources available in terms of sanitation, unlike approximately 1/3 of the world's population.* By the end of the day, I had just enough water to wash my face (without soap) and brush my teeth.

I didn't have enough water to have my "before bed" cup of tea though, which was mildly displeasing.

1.5 litres of water to shower with

Showering was quite hard as I had only 1.5 litres of water to clean myself with - body and hair. As it shows in the photo, the amount of water barely even covered my foot. I realised that there was no way in hell that I could wash my body and my hair with such a little amount, so stuck to washing my body and decided that I would have to take days in turn, one day shower, one day wash my hair.

Bucket showering is the main way to shower in India, and I was extremely lucky there to be able to use around 6 litres of water to shower with meaning that I could wash my body and hair without having to strategically plan it out. Living in the UK, I have several choices on how to wash myself - and all of them include as much water as I want to use and for however long. An 8 minute shower in the UK uses approximately 62 litres of water.*

Despite the extremely limited amount of water, I felt considerably cleaner using the 1.5 litres as using a bucket, and being conscious of the water usage makes me pay more attention to making sure that all of me is clean. (As well as knowing that I could wash my hair the next day).

I successfully managed to shower, wash my clothes, keep up my personal hygiene and drink and cook with my 5 litres a day, although I had no water left at the end of the day.

Here is a few tips that I have thought of for people to use less water:

- Always turn faucets off when not using water. Leaving the water running when brushing your teeth, washing your face, even washing your hands, is a waste of water. I used 1 litre to keep up good personal hygiene for 24 hours by not leaving taps on or using any more water than what was needed.

- When water is running, don't run it too fast. The faster the water comes out the tap, the more is wasted, and it will probably splash everywhere and that's not fun.

- When showering, try to shower for only as long as needed. I tend to do "5 minute" showers - listen to a song 5 minutes long and get out the shower when the song has ended.

- Don't use excessive amounts of product to wash with. The more product you use, the more water is used to wash it off.


I will post more each day of my experiences of my #5Litresaday challenge.

* https://www.livebelowtheline.com.au/
* http://everylittledrop.com.au/knowledge-center/how-much-water-does-a-person-need/* http://www.wateraid.org/what-we-do/the-crisis/statistics
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15836433

The Journey of a Bottle: How to make a Vertical Garden in Rajasthan, India

During my time in Rajasthan, India, I was using a fancy, overly-priced filtered water bottle that I bought prior to my travels (which was a complete waste of my money, by the way). Due to using the same bottle everyday, I never realised how many bottles of water were bought, drank, and then thrown away or burned after just one use. I spent a good month in India being completely oblivious to the fact that the bottles used to distribute clean drinking water were also non-reusable and advised buyers to chuck away these bottles after use!

Whilst in the city of Jodhpur, where our Mid Phase Review* was hosted, the hotel that we stayed in gave all 24 volunteers a 1 litre bottle of drinking water at every meal. That was 62 bottles per day for the 3 days that we were there. 186 bottles. This doesn't include the extra bottles that we requested. So lets say, in the 3 days that we were there, we effectively used 200 non-reusable bottles when we all had water bottles of our own.

Some bottles collected from hotel in Jodhpur

On the morning of leaving the hotel in Jodhpur I asked my Project Coordinator what happens to all the bottles once they have been used. She told me that they will probably either be chucked away or burned. Naturally, this worried me as we had used A LOT of plastic bottles, so I decided to round up all the bottles that hadn't already been taken away, and with help from the other volunteers, we successfully carried around 100 bottles back to Kotri, a 300km haul.

Me and another volunteer were focusing on the environment and how to effectively reuse materials that would otherwise be burned and cause more harm than good. We decided to make a Vertical Garden where both flowers and food could grow.



How to make a Vertical Garden in Kotri, Rajasthan:

Step 1) Save a lot of plastic bottles from being thrown away or burned.

Step 2) Ask questions. Where do we get seeds from? Where do we get soil from? There is a drought, will this even work? Can we get all the resources we need locally? Will anyone turn up to the sessions?!

Step 3) Fertilise some soil. Hurry, a Manthan mentor, helped us to dig up some unfertilised soil, and taught us how to effectively fertilise it using cow dung. One of the most liberating things I did in India was get my hands deep into some cow faeces!

Hurry, Harry, Hannah and Tamlal Ji fertilising soil; Indian style!

Step 4) Find some seeds! Ask people to help you. Find local resources and find the demand. For example, we planted chili seeds.

Step 5) Find some youth to join in the sessions. This was the tricky part. We held a few different sessions but the youth did not turn up to any!

Step 6) Don't give up.

Step 7) Make the session more fun. Include painting and music!

Hannah and youth girls painting bottles

 Step 8) With your newly found group of environmentalists, start cutting and painting the bottles, plant the seeds, hang the bottles from the biggest tree in the village and show off their great work!

Some Vertical Gardens hanging from tree in Kotri

The purpose of doing the Vertical Garden session was to teach the youth of Kotri to take care of their environment and that anything can be reused to make something. We painted the bottles to make them look more appealing and planted seeds that the village depend on. Part of the youth group we set up was to help the villagers to understand that the more active they are in their community, the better. We asked them to instead of burning or disposing of bottles, to make some Vertical Gardens of their own.

Tamlal Ji, Hannah and Harry

Tips:
- If you like to carry a water bottle around with you, invest in a durable one rather than buying a new one everyday
- reuse bottles by either becoming creative or reusing them to drink water out of
- drink tap water instead of buying bottled water everyday
- encourage your friends to do the same
- love your environment


Mid Phase Review* - 3 days out of our villages to relax, reflect and review our work progress to that date and to make action plans.

The Alpha-Goat of Kotri

The Alpha-Goat of Kotri

In the village of Kotri there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of goats. Herds of goats walk the streets of the village like gangs, asserting an almost arrogant dominance of the place. Some have found themselves accommodation and co-exist happily with their human families. Some live in pens, all goats together, and some, like the Alpha-Goat of Kotri, have chosen to live the unconventional life on the hard-knock streets that they roam.

Volunteer Hannah with Goaty - a goat belonging to a host family.

Goats. They cause so much traffic in the small village of Kotri. Pedestrians have to stop in their paths. Vehicles of all kinds come to a stand-still. This plethora of species and objects, with the added haphazard journeys of the dogs, cows and buffalos, create a chaotic new language that is indecipherable to the human ear. The only way to avoid this rush is to side step through the litter and faeces at the side of the road. Goats. They really do have run of the place.

Before having my first real experience of co-existing in the same space as goats, I thought they were all the same. How terribly wrong I was. Apart from their difference in rearing, their primitive behaviour and aesthetics, I thought they were all the same. How terribly wrong I was.  This was my mind-set until I met the one, the only, the Alpha-Goat of Kotri.

I met the Alpha-Goat of Kotri one day whilst waiting for the bus to Kishangarh with my fellow volunteers, Harry and Noel. Under an elderly tree which was crippled and entwined fiercely by old age, there he was, looking mundane and no different to any other goat, laying in the shade that the tree provided.

The Alpha-Goat of Kotri at night, near the shop.

The attention that I spent on him was fleeting, a mere acknowledgement of his existence. As I chatted away to my friends, the Alpha-Goat decided to assert his clear authority and dominance over the village – a memo that the ICS PRAVAH volunteers evidently hadn’t received. Slowly, he sauntered into our vision, into the middle of the road. My initial reaction was to think ‘I wonder what that goat is doing by himself’ as goats never seem to travel alone in the village of Kotri, and it was a strange sight to see. This was the first sign that I had overlooked which gave a hint into how much power he really possessed. Unhurriedly, he walked up to a herd of five cows and bleated at them with such force and control that these huge, heavy hunks of animals scarpered. They trotted gradually from the side of the road that they had been occupying. I was amazed. I had watched this seemingly more than ordinary goat overpower five animals that could have easily flicked him away with a swift movement from their tails.

What the newly coined ‘Alpha-Goat of Kotri’ did next was so shocking that I could not help but laugh out in surprise. The Alpha-Goat leisurely turned his head to look at his spectators, made eye contact with me and my counterparts, and then let release a steady stream of urine that seemed to take forever to stop. Once he was done, he strutted back to his resting place, victorious in his aims, and went back to sleep.

From that day on, and every day since, I have acknowledged the lone goat with the true respect that he deserves. He resides next to the local shop most days, watching the comings and goings of the people in his village. He is the undeniable leader of the community, trumping even the political power of the Sarpanch. The hierarchy of the village changed that day and with my vision now unclouded, I saw that in the boundaries of Kotri, goats reign supreme.

I asked his supremacy for an interview but he merely bleated and trotted away to take care of some affairs that he had pending.

Volunteer Noel with the Alpha-Goat of Kotri