Rachel Beckwith wanted to raise $300 by her ninth birthday to help bring clean water to people in poor countries. Donors from across the world are making sure her wish is realized after her death, perhaps a thousand times over.
Rachel was about $80 short of her goal when she turned 9 in June, and then a horrific highway traffic accident took her life away last week. But news of the Bellevue, Wash., girl’s pluck and selflessness emerged after the tragedy, and it is inspiring thousands of people — most of them strangers — to push her dream along.
By Tuesday afternoon, her webpage that was set up to take contributions for charity:water, a nonprofit organization that brings clean drinking water to people in developing nations, had attracted more than $200,000 in pledges.
Here is a video from charity:water:
Water Changes Everything. from charity: water on Vimeo.
Rachel's page shows that although her goal was $300, she has now raised $711,825, serving 35,591 people's water needs in places like sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America.
One life. One death. 20,367 people coming together to make Rachel's dream come true. And yes, one of those was me. $20 is apparently the amount that it takes to provide water for one person. It seemed a good number, and about what I'd spend on a book or a meal at a restaurant. So sometime in the next few months, a lot of wells are going to be dug in Rachel's name.
Whenever, as in the previous story, I really wonder about the depravities of humanity, a child's innocent wish, and the people who make it happen, inspires me.
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