Charity: Water a special birthday gift in September Special

In September Charity:Water in New York will run its second birthday campaign. The group is hoping to raise 10 times more than they did in their first year when they were able to help 50,000 people have clean water.

In 2004 Scott Harrison was unhappy and needed a change. He was making big money as a nightclub promoter but was faced with spiritual bankruptcy. He signed on to volunteer for a group called Mercy Ships. The humanitarian organization offers free medical care in some of the world's poorest nations and has done so for the past 25 years. Harrison worked as a photojournalist, documenting the good that the group was doing. He covered leper colonies, villages with no water and the people that had no running water living in poverty. In Liberia Harrison saw families living on less than $365 a year. That was less than a night out in New York City for the young man. While in Kenya Scott Harrison had seen muddy water come out of the taps of a hospital. He knew something had to be done. Water is life. The lack of water was an area that Harrison could focus on, thus Charity:Water was born. For his birthday he wanted the day to matter. He asked everyone to donate $32 for his 32nd birthday to Charity:Water. He also asked everyone with a September birthday to ask friends to donate to the cause. Sarah Cohen, media relations for Charity:Water, said in an email, " We raised almost $1 million that gave access to clean and safe drinking water to more than 50,000 people in Ethiopia during that campaign. Last year we launched mycharitywater.org, which allowed individuals to set up their own birthday campaigns, which continued to raise funds beyond September, so we didn’t capture the same kind of totals within the time period as in previous years." This year the goal for 2010 September is over a million dollars. One of the peoples that will benefit are the Bayaka. The Bayaka were one of the last hunter-gatherer societies in the world, until the logging industry pushed them out of the forest. Now, they live on the outskirts of villages, facing rejection and abuse by locals who see them as animals that belong in the jungle. They are often denied use of water sources and have to wait until dark to collect drinking water from village wells. Many end up using dirty streams and ponds instead. Charity:Water hopes that the gift donations they receive this year will bring clean water to 90,000 in Central African Republic including 100 percent of the Bayaka people.