Celebration Report - Clarenville Global 6K for Water In honour of Joshua
- Elizabeth Wilcox
- Dec 16, 2020
- 3 min read
With great joy, we can say God is faithful!
Our friends Marsha and John Rowe came last night to give us the good news about the construction of the well in Joshua’s memory.
As you all know, World Vision team choose a village in Iraq in great need of water.
This is the report:
Celebration Report - Clarenville Global 6K for Water In honour of Joshua Wilcox
2020 has been an unpredictable year with so many unknowns. In the face of adversity, the Clarenville community rallied together to be a part of something much larger: a global community raising funds to provide clean water in a country where it is most needed, Iraq.
This year to honour the amazing life of Joshua Wilcox, the community of Clarenville raised over $15,000 to bring clean water to one of the most vulnerable communities in the world. Al Nawfeli village, the biggest village in South Sinjar district, is located among a series of villages that were severely affected by the armed conflict with ISIL in 2014. The negative impact of this conflict can be seen in the significant lack of access to clean drinking water. The families most impacted were displaced from their villages in 2017 to different places in Nineveh and Syria. Upon return to their villages, they found their communities in ruins without any assurance of support from the government or humanitarian organizations working in Iraq at that time.
The main and only source of drinking water in the village was a borehole which was destroyed during the crisis. The families had to travel between 4 kilometres (for water that was dirty) to 14 kilometres (for clean water that they had to pay for) to fetch water for their families. In 2020, while Clarenville began the Global 6K for water and was actively fundraising, World Vision entered Al Nawfeli with the goal of helping them gain reliable access to a source of clean water, quickly.
With the help of your amazing fundraising efforts and donors like you, World Vision was able to successfully gain approval to rehabilitate the community borehole which was de-commissioned due to damage sustained during the war in 2014. This was seen as the most cost-effective approach to guarantee clean water to this community, as well as to ensure the safety of World Vision staff working in one of the most fragile contexts globally. This decision allowed us to provide a now fully functioning borehole within a year which has provided clean water to 250 families!
Our team recently interviewed a community member in Al Nawfeli about the impact of this project. He said, “Water is the secret of life and the main element for human beings to live. When we have clean water, we encourage other families to return back to the village.”
“The benefits of the project are extremely high in our village because we don’t need to travel a long distance and pay to bring water home,” he continued, “The families in the village shall save about 50,000 IQD ($55 CDN) on average and can use this money toward healthcare, schooling and food for the families. These families need this amount of money because they lost their assets and belongings during the conflict. Many families were suffering from health issues linked to dirty water.”
Thank you Clarenville for making such a huge impact globally. The legacy of Joshua will live on around the world.
We are so thankful for the World Vision team in Clarenville, for the Community of Clarenville and different parts of Newfoundland (300+ donors) that made this possible.
250+ families have now access to water!
My wife, she knows what means to struggle for water. Her hometown in Mexico has been on a 3 year's drought and the farmers are desperate. Municipal service cuts the water several hours a day to conserve the precious liquid. The main water source (for approx. 2M people) came from a 40+ KM pipeline to a lake.
The village (city and surrounding areas) selected by World Vision has been the source of attacks since 2014.
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20201117-five-years-after-liberation-of-sinjar-in-northern-iraq-yazidis-return-home-despite-tensions
It is a blessing and honour to join efforts to help families that had suffered so much.
With so much gratitude to all the donors, the World Vision team and our faithful God that made this possible.
~ My wife always dreams for Joshua to become a missionary. I guess in one sense God fulfilled my wife's heart desire in a remote village in Iraq.
Thanks,
Bryan and Elizabeth Wilcox
Water for 250+ families in Al Nawfeli village, the biggest village in South Sinjar district.
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