It was a small act done with ‘great love’

I don’t like the word impossible. I’ve seen and experienced enough of life’s abrupt plot twists and miraculous moments to give myself the freedom to remove such an obsolete expression from my vocabulary.

Yet, after walking around the Suki community in Ethiopia with our partner organization, ACT, there are few words more appropriate. Imagine 25,000 people existing with no sanitation facilities, almost no access to clean water, and most teetering on the sharp edge of sickness and death. It felt like one of the most impossible places to live.

So much of what you and I do together is about changing impossible situations.

Your investment helps provide practical life-changing wells, latrines, and HIV support programs for ending the water and HIV/AIDS crises in Africa. But you also help provide day-to-day acts of love that help meet the deep thirst that many people living with HIV have to feel loved and valued.

While visiting our partner in Ethiopia, we met with Sarah* in her home. We came to see how she was handling the medications she was taking to battle both HIV and the untreatable cancer in her body. Most importantly, we were there to listen, hold her hand, and celebrate with her as she talked about her son, who just graduated from electronics school.

I’ve learned that fighting sickness is not just done with medicine, but also by loving and dignifying those who are sick. This is an example of the real, life-giving impact you help make possible through your support of Blood:Water.

Sarah tells us that she knows she’s dying and that her son can’t afford to bury her. She also shares that her family won’t touch her because of the stigma around HIV, and how they’ve chosen to abandon her. She wants to believe that her life is worth more than the sum of her physical poverty and her medical diagnoses.

When Mother Teresa said, “We can do no great things; only small things with great love,” I think she meant that the small things we do—like providing a funeral, holding the hand of a woman who’s rarely been touched, or celebrating a graduation with a proud mom—offer the most healing and bring the most light and hope.

It will take many small acts of love to end the water and HIV/AIDS crises. Every act matters. So thank you for the ones you’ve made possible. Let’s do more together!

*Names changed for privacy throughout