The Tragic Cost of Water Scarcity
00:00:00.000 | 700 million people in the world don't have water.
00:00:01.840 | I was in Northern Ethiopia once,
00:00:03.840 | and somebody came up to me in a $5 a night hotel room lobby
00:00:08.300 | and said, "Hey, you're the charity water guy.
00:00:11.100 | "We've heard of you.
00:00:11.940 | "Let me tell you a story."
00:00:12.760 | The women in my village,
00:00:13.600 | they used to all walk eight hours a day.
00:00:15.120 | And he goes, "There was this one woman,
00:00:16.540 | "and at the end of one of her walks,
00:00:19.380 | "before she got home, she slipped and she fell,
00:00:22.280 | "and all the water that she had just walked for
00:00:24.080 | "spilled out into the ground.
00:00:25.640 | "And she had this clay pot on her back,
00:00:27.440 | "and the clay pot shattered,
00:00:29.200 | "and there were shards all over the path."
00:00:30.960 | And he said, "She didn't go get another pot.
00:00:33.240 | "She didn't go back and go refill the water."
00:00:36.160 | He said, "She took a rope, and she climbed a tree,
00:00:38.960 | "and she tied a noose around her neck, and she hung herself.
00:00:41.840 | "It's in the center of my village,
00:00:43.080 | "and we found her body swinging from a tree."
00:00:44.880 | And what I didn't know until I lived in this village
00:00:48.680 | was that she was 13 years old when she died.
00:00:51.160 | There's statistics, and then there is the story
00:00:54.240 | of a real life person who's just one of those
00:00:57.440 | 703 million people.