In many countries, shortage of drinking water is one of the main problems. But not in the US. It's amazing that it was in the States that a 9-year-old girl made her goal to fight this disaster.
In Seattle, where the 9-year-old Rachel lived, the head of the charity organization came with a lecture. He stood on the stage and told how his organization fights with a shortage of clean water in the poorest countries. And somewhere in the darkness of the hall sat the shocked Rachel: for the first time in her life she saw footage in which hundreds of depleted people drank water from puddles and marshes. She learned that 4,5 thousand children die daily from terrible diseases because of this water. Rachel decides to save them.
"One of the ways of saving, which our organization came up with, is to give money for a birthday. That is, instead of the birthday that we usually arrange in honor of ourselves, we propose to arrange them in honor of others, says "Charity water" founder Scott Harrison.
With the help of her mother on the site of the charity, Rachel created her page, where she asked all her friends not to gift her dolls and dresses for her birthday, but to donate money for the sake of saving children. She wanted to collect 300 dollars so that 15 people could get access to clean water.
A few weeks later, America flies news: on the highway in Seattle, 20 cars collided. In one of them was Rachel with her family. Dozens of people who have fallen into this catastrophe survive. And only Rachel with multiple fractures of the spine gets into resuscitation. Doctors are powerless.
Learning of the tragedy, Scott Harris - the same man whose lecture once shocked Rachel, reopened her page on the Internet. He never met a girl from Seattle who was standing in line to ask questions. The queue was too long, and her mother was in a hurry. Now he watched every day as strange things happened on the page with Rachel's last wish. Money flowed like a stream.
"The campaign spread to the entire Rachel church. In a matter of days more than 100 thousand dollars were collected. Then it spread to the whole of Seattle. 300 thousand, 400 thousand dollars, and then we generally ceased to understand what was happening"- says the founder of "Charity water" Scott Harrison.
Tens of thousands of people from all over the world wrote on the page of Rachel tens of thousands of touching letters. History developed rapidly. Children from different countries shook out their piggy banks and asked their parents to transfer money to Rachel's account. Adults added their bills. Total it turned out to collect 1 million 200 thousand dollars! This was enough to save not 15 people, but 60 thousand!
A woman who did not have time to recover after the loss of a child, increasingly appeared on TV screens to thank for the generosity. The audience already knew about the unusual biography of Rachel: how she twice grew and cut off her braids to give them to wigs to bald children suffering from cancer, and how after death in a catastrophe her organs saved the life of another person.
"I was shocked by the all-encompassing love and support, this is incalculable pain and happiness at the same time," says Mom Rachel Bekvis Samantha Paul.
Parents Rachel invited to the stadiums. And the stadiums meet them standing with a standing ovation.
"Do you know what we will do on the anniversary of Rachel's death? Together with her mother, we will move from one African village to another, the third, fourth and so on, where already there is water thanks to Rachel. She will meet with the thousands of people her daughter brought health, happiness and a new life" says "Charity water" founder Scott Harrison.