From Auburn Magazine Fall 2024
Water—the foundation of all life on our planet—is a hard-won luxury in the world’s poorest regions. One group of Auburn alumni is working to change that.
The Water Hole
They came to a pit in the rugged wilderness of Ethiopia and looked down. A long line of women and girls—exhausted, malnourished, some old and some still children—each made the treacherous climb down the muddy embankment of the chasm. There, they scooped into worn plastic jerrycans their most desperately needed but scarcest of all resources—water.
It was the same four-hour journey they had made the day before and would make again tomorrow. One their mothers and grandmothers had made from their impoverished rural village for generations. While the men and boys worked other jobs, they gathered this cloudy, mud-colored rainwater from the only source around and carried it home.
It was the first time Tara Collins ’14 witnessed the struggle for water in person. A globally minded activist since high school, she’d successfully run for the 2013 Miss Auburn on a platform of improving access to clean water around the world. But even with the knowledge that this daily routine was essential—so essential, in fact, that it prevented girls and women from attending school or holding jobs—seeing it firsthand was heartbreaking.
“I knew it would be moving, but being there yourself, there’s nothing like it,” said Collins. “They would send the youngest girls who were most agile down to the bottom so they could climb down and not fall. They would get the water—each jerrycan weighs 40 pounds—and they’d haul it up to the next woman.”
But as the former marketing director for the international nonprofit neverthirst, she had come to do more than observe. Collins was part of a group monitoring the progress of a nearby drilling project that, once completed, would deliver clean water directly from underground aquifers to the local village.
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