Area residents will be participating in a Water Walk for Kenya Saturday, June 1 to raise funds for portable water filtration systems for villagers in rural Maasai and Kampo villages in the Great Rift Valley and northeast Kenya.
The walk, hosted by the Rotary Club of Waynesboro, starts at 8 a.m. at the Buchanan Automotive Stadium in Waynesboro. Participants will walk a 3-mile course, carrying a 1-gallon water container for half the distance to simulate the task of water retrieval faced by the villagers. Each $30 registration fee provides five years of clean water for a family of six in the Rift Valley region.
“We ask people to do what many Kenyans do every day – walk a mile and a half to a source of water and walk back with full water containers,” offered Rotary club member Jeff Rock, activity chair. “Join us and make a world of difference,” he added.
Ken and Judy Clark and are the co-founders of Clean Water Kenya. The water filtration systems provided by the effort cleanse the local drinking water of the bacteria that causes typhoid, cholera, amoebic dysentery, salmonella, E.coli, botulism, giardia, cryptosporidium and other pathogens that are deadly to the Maasai. The program also provides an educational program that focuses on water hygiene and was management and sanitation.
Ken Clark founded Clean Water Kenya in January 2016 after a self-funded trip to Kenya in April 2015 to deliver medical supplies to area clinics.He recognized the great need for clean drinking and cooking water and that many, if not all, the diseases from which the Maasai suffered could be drastically reduced and possibly eliminated if they had the means to filter the water of the bacteria and pathogens causing their disease.
After research, he found a portable easy-to-maintain water filtration system from the Sawyer Company of Safety Harbor, Florida, and organized an online fundraiser for these filters. He and Judy returned to Kenya in late October 2015 to set up a 16 village test plot.
To date, Clean Water Kenya has delivered over 2,000 Chujio Water Filters servicing more than 100,000 rural Kenyans of the Maasai and Kamba tribes.
For more information, visit:
