Thoughts on the Colours of Water
Our annual Share A Drop Gala was this weekend. This year’s theme, “Colours of Water,” celebrates diversity and how nonprofit work brings people together.
Our annual Share A Drop Gala was this Saturday. After months of preparation, H2O4ALL employees, volunteers and supporters met on Zoom to celebrate a year’s progress in striving to provide safe water access in our partner communities. During the Gala, we honoured two of our most loyal volunteers — Samuel Muthinja for the United States and Hycinth Gomez for Canada— for a year of going above and beyond with the One Drop Award.
Old friends and coworkers who hadn’t seen each other in person for years were able to connect on Zoom. We enjoyed live music, courtesy of Ghanaian gospel singer Adjekwei Mensah and Canadian guitarist Jacob Moon, and shared messages of thanks and hope from our partner communities. We also discussed on this year’s theme: “The Colours of Water.”
I’d been looking forward to the gala for a while, for a few different reasons. The first reason was the sense of community that the gala brought. As a remote worker in my first year at the organization, I had often felt disconnected from the work we were doing. I knew about what we were doing, and about the impact our projects had on our client communities; of course, it’s impossible to write about a topic without gaining knowledge of that topic, unless you want to write a pretty terrible piece.
Still, though I talk with board members about promoting different projects, and I sometimes ask project liaisons to provide their perspective for this or that article, it was a rare occasion for me to meet the people whose work I was promoting. The gala was an opportunity for me to be part of the H2O4ALL community — and, after a year of remote work, I’m sure many of my coworkers felt the same way about being together on Zoom.
The other main reason was that I finally got to learn what “Colours of Water” actually meant.
I had written on theme of the Colours of Water, albeit briefly, at least a dozen times while doing promotion for the gala. The newsletter line went something like this, “This year’s theme is ‘The Colours of Water;’ we want to start a conversation about diversity, how nonprofit work brings people together, and the mental and emotional impact that water has on our lives.” In the corporate gala package, we talked more about that mental and emotional impact, in the form of the different “colours of water” and what they meant.
We used the colours of the rainbow — red stood for passion, urgency and power; yellow for excitement, vitality and happiness; green for growth and harmony; blue for peace, trust and loyalty; and purple for power, mystery, creativity and success. Water, diversity, the meaning of colours — they all made sense in relation to the gala theme, but it never really clicked how they were related to one another.
I’d been working with this theme for a few months by the time of the gala, and it had intrigued me without ever really making sense. Then at the gala, I got to hear from some of our project liaisons — people who had been on the ground in water-stressed communities, and had been able to see up close what life was like in those communities before and after they had access to safe water — and the idea started making a lot more sense.
The updates from our project communities were a big part of the gala. We’d spent the last two years working with the communities in Mulika Village, Kenya; in Tsopoli Village, Ghana; at Tom and Margaret Education Centre in Mawotto Village, Uganda; and with several schools in the Dominican Republic. Representatives from each of these projects spoke on behalf of their communities. Each speaker had a short video where they spoke about their community and its people, the importance of safe water in their daily lives, and the impact that H2O4ALL’s partnerships had for their community. They also discussed, in keeping with the gala’s theme, the colour of water that represented their country.
Uganda — represented by Zac Mulawa, our liaison for Mawotto Village — was represented by the colour green. In colour theory, green indicates growth, balance and harmony. It was a fitting theme for our recent projects in the village; a safe water source and a food sustainability project at Tom and Margaret Education Center. Nearly everything we had done in Mawotto since the initial installation of the borehole, from cultivating the food sustainability project to providing the children at Tom and Margaret with bunk beds, had been in the name of helping the community’s children to live healthier and more hopeful lives. Growth was a fitting theme. After a brief virtual tour through Mawotto Village, green made even more sense for Uganda— as the young lady from Mawotto who introduced the video said, the area around Mawotto Village was green as far as the eye could see.
Meanwhile, Adjekwei Mensah, who spoke for our client community in Tsopoli Village, Ghana, chose the colour yellow — representing vitality, novelty and happiness. In the video introducing Tsopoli Village, Mensah states “The colour represents the way we feel.” He explains how, in 2017, a water harvesting system and a borehole became the community’s first reliable source of safe water, and the immeasurable impact this water source had had on the community.
Tsopoli is still one of our client communities, and safe water is still a struggle in the village. H2O4ALL is working on improving the village’s sanitation system — in fact, it’s one of the projects we were fundraising for this year. Neveretheless, the message from Tsopoli revealed a spirit of optimism and a clear sense of faith in the future.
Mulika Village in Kenya, represented by our project liaison Francis Mutua, was represented by the colour blue — indicating peace, trust and loyalty. In his message, Mutua used the meaning of blue to describe the relationship between the Mulika community and H2O4ALL. Having kept track of H2O4ALL’s projects through 2021, it was easy for me to see where this idea was coming from. Mulika has been our client community since 2017, beginning with the installation of a borehole. Since then, we’ve worked tirelessly to improve water access and sanitation in Mulika.
We’ve extended the waterway to include five water access points, including the school, the market, the health centre and the police station, along with a set of community faucets. In addition, this past year saw the conversion of Mulika’s water pump from conventional power to solar power, and multiple initiatives with KWAHO to educate the Mulika community on hygiene and water maintenance.
Dario Nolasco from Servant’s Heart Ministries, speaking for H2O4ALL’s client communities in the Dominican Republic, chose the colour red — indicating love, passion and urgency in colour theory. In his message, he explained how H2O4ALL’s work had impacted the community, specifically its meaning for families and children. Like our work in Mawotto Village, much of H2O4ALL’s projects in the Dominican Republic have been centred around providing safe water for vulnerable children and their families.
One of the main benefactors of H2O4ALL’s partnership with Servant’s Heart Ministries was the Colegio Luz, Amor Y Vida in Sosua, which received a safe water system in 2016. In addition, our most recent project in the D.R. has put safe water and hand washing stations in several schools, preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other communicable diseases as schools begin to open up again. As most of our projects were centred on protecting families, I thought it was fitting that red, which represents love, would be the colour of water for our projects in the Dominican Republic.
After a year of watching all these projects develop hundreds of miles away, it was something else to hear everybody’s take on how safe water access had affected their lives. It occurred to me that, despite each project having similar goals and similar methods, everyone was able to find something unique to say about it. This wasn’t surprising to me. As I’ve said ad nauseam on this blog — when something as fundamental as water is missing from a community, the quality of life in that community can decrease in countless ways. When safe water is introduced into the community, there are myriad ways in which life rapidly becomes better.
Nevertheless, seeing the different attitudes from each of our communities, observing how access to safe water had changed their lives, felt like a window into each community. The effects of safe water resembled, in a way, the colours of water in their diversity —while there were plenty of similarities between communities, each different background showed safe water access in a different light.
And like the blur of colours on all of our promotional images, the testimonies seemed to fit together — each a piece of the painstaking struggle for water access that H2O4ALL has been part of for more than a decade now. Alone they would have been bright enough, but together they complemented each other and became something greater than the sum of its parts. Even hundreds of miles away on a Zoom meeting, it was a sight to behold.
Thank you to all my friends at H2O4ALL, and to everyone who attended or donated to this year’s gala. You can check out the livestream of the gala here.
