My mom and dad are trying to clear out things from their home. They still live in the house that I grew up in. And so I just got in the mail a poster that I had made as a school project, I think in second grade, where I was painting the storm drains in our neighborhood. "Chesapeake Bay drainage, don't dump." And I was like, oh, I got started as a clean water advocate in the second grade.

The first thing I noticed was not the thirst. It was the silence. In rural Ghana's Bono Region, women and children rise before dawn, carrying empty yellow "Kuffuor gallons" toward streams shared with wandering goats — brown after rain, muddy pools in the dry season. Yet this was the water families drank. When clean water finally flowed, one woman put it best: "This water has given us back our time. Now we can think about tomorrow instead of only today." A story of how water r

In 2023, two moments in and around Zinder, Niger, changed how I think about water security, both during the rainy season, when water appears everywhere. Along a highway, families filled containers from reddish-brown pools stained by the soil, water for drinking. Weeks later in the city, a woman offered me a cloudy glass harvested from her rooftop, because safe water was kilometres away. Water was present in both. Security was not. A simple lesson: availability is not the same