"Water has no colour, no race, no nationality, it is the same all over the world," according to Rania Flavie Tourma, an Orthodox Christian from Syria.
So to her, it was perfectly natural that people from around the world gathered near Geneva, Switzerland at the Ecumenical Water Network (EWN) Summer School on Water to unite in defence of this natural resource.
While water is vital for all, Tourma and others attending this unique summer school know all too well that access to water, and the awareness of how precious it is, could hardly be more unequally distributed. As Christians, the 22 young men and women who met at the World Council of Churches (WCC) Ecumenical Institute in Bossey for eight days of intense learning about water issues feel compelled to speak out against this injustice.
Their professional backgrounds were as diverse as the 18 countries and six different continents they came from. Their presentations on water issues in their countries really complemented the lectures by international experts on water management, advocacy and development.
Summer school student Roderick Chukwuemeka Oji from Nigeria started his presentation holding up a small plastic pouch of water which is sold on the streets of Lagos for five Naira, less then five cents US. "In my country, we call this pure water," he said.
However, the content of these packets is far from safe to drink, the law student and Presbyterian youth leader explained. All too often the water that is sealed in this transparent plastic comes from an uncontrolled source and bears a made-up license number. No wonder the elites prefer bottled water from abroad, he said.
Oji was not the only one who reported on poor drinking water supplies in a country blessed with rivers and abundant rain. Participants from Rwanda, Honduras, Armenia and Lesotho all spoke of the unequal distribution of a resource that is not so scarce.
Another student, Packiaraj Asirvatham from India, told of an apparently successful campaign four years ago in which several thousand local people rallied against the construction of a soft drinks factory in Gangaikondan, India, which was going to take unsustainable amounts of water out of a river which the whole district relied on.
While the campaign was successful at the time, the 27-year-old pastor of the Church of South India warned that vigilance remained necessary even after what seemed like a victory. Just a few days before leaving to attend the ecumenical summer school he had returned to Gangaikondan only to find that the bottling unit was now up and running.
