DavidHewitt

In many ways it was the worst possible week for me to attempt to do this challenge, as I was on the road a lot and often far into the evenings, so I had very little time to 'walk off' my water usage.  BUT if you live in rural Uganda and you have to walk 6km for every bucket of water, that's your priority and I guess that's the real point here.  We have the luxury of jobs that pay for decent lifestyles and resources like water literally on tap so we can just get on with the job and family/social life etc.  Our Ugandan friend is so busy using up her time to deal with the basics of keeping her family alive, not to mention the physical effort of carrying such a heavy weight all that way, each and every day, that things like a job and extra money are unimaginable luxuries.

So how did I do?  Poorly.  I used at least 400 litres of water, for which I should have walked 40km, and probably did about half of that in the week.  But I'm not feeling too bad about it because failing the Poverty Challenge actually makes the point more clearly - life in the developing world is hard and we would look pretty foolish trying to work as hard and cope with that level of responsibility.  I definitely have a new appreciation of just one aspect of this problem, and hope we can all help to make this world a fairer, more equitable place.

OK, well I'm typing this in a McDonalds somewhere in North Yorkshire on my way to a meeting.  Not everyone's favorite place I know, but for the purposes of this challenge I was at least gratified to note that in the Gents they have waterless urinals!

Meanwhile, less good news on the water consumption research.  Seems like a gravity shower uses 35 litres and whilst I might dispute this in my case given that as a typical bloke I take a fairly quick one each day, I note that a power shower uses 80!  So I'll live with the 35 number, x7 = 245 litres.  Definitely no baths for me at 80 a pop.  Unfortunately no (waterless or otherwise) urinals at our place but they reckon 8 litres per toilet flush.  I'm an adherent of the nasty old adage ("if it's brown flush it down; if it's yellow let it mellow") at least for this week, but without getting any more graphic let's just say I should allow about 100 litres for the week.  Tea and coffee - at least 20 litres a week.

Can anyone suggest other water usage please?  I'll keep thinking too, but so far I'm already staring at 360 litres, ie 18 buckets of water, ie 36km to walk (imagining I'm in a developing country and having to go collect each bucket from 2km away).  That's pretty scary, especially as I only walked 6km so far and I have a busy week involving a lot of driving and not much time for walking.  But if I was in that distant community I'd have no debate - water would come first no matter what.

OK, so I'm a day late with this first blog entry.  I'm going to cheat straight away because on Sunday - technically the day before the start of the challenge) I went for a decent walk in the country of about 6km.  However I'm going to count this because I knew my week would be very busy and tough to make much time for walking, plus that's pretty impressive for me as a generally unfit couch potato (check out the photo!).  I take a shower a day, so by tomorrow I'll work out how much water that represents and how much I'll need to walk during the week to offset that amount.  I drink a lot of coffee and tea, and of course use the toilet, so will need to factor that in along with any other water use. 

Of course this is a poor representation of the daily struggle of the most vulnerable people in the world to obtain water and use it for all their needs.  For instance I ate a pizza last night - I imagine in a rural village in Ethiopia or Colombia they would be making the evening meal and using quite a bit of water in the process.  Hmm... 

My challenge is to walk 2 km for every (20 litre) bucket of water I use.

This is a very unbalanced world.  I hope this will make me really appreciate the scarcity of natural resources, especially for the vulnerable people who are being hit by climate change. Women in Africa and Asia on average have to walk 3 times this distance to get water!

I live in Selby and Ainsty constituency and will be asking my MP Nigel Adams what he thinks about my challenge - might he want to walk for water too?