London Marathon 2007

I am sure most of us saw pictures of the 34,000 runners who took part in this years marathon. In amongst that throng was my friend and colleague Russ who is also a fellow Plumstead Common resident. As with many of the competitors, Russ was running to raise money for charity, but unlike many of the runners who were raising money for well know causes such as Breast cancer (and good luck to those people) he was running for a little known charity called ‘Wells for India’.

Russ the runner!!
Russ is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, so to do my bit in a little tiny way to help him out I thought I would find out a bit about Wells for India and write about what they do.

The first thing to say is that they are a very small charity, but what they do makes a huge difference to the people that they help. Their work is based in the Rajasthan area of North West India. This is a very dry and very poor part of the country. We hear a lot these days about how well India is doing economically (which is great) but all that development is not evenly spread and it is a sobering thought that 1/3 of the worlds poorest people live in India. Rajasthan is about the same size as the UK with a population of 60million, but there the similarities end. It basically only rains in the summer, and then not that much! 15 million people live in poverty, in this case that means absolute rather than not being able to pay their Sky TV subscriptions. 11% of children die before they get to 5 years old and 50% suffer from malnutrition.

It is easy to become immune to these kinds of statistics or to think the problems are so big that nothing we can do will make a difference. The great thing about Wells for India is that it disproves this notion, which is one of the things which attracted Russ to the charity. A relatively small amount of money raised in this country goes a very long way to helping a large number of people in a big way in India.

Their website is really good and goes into a lot of detail about how they help people to manage water resources, so that they can grow more food and have access to good clean drinking water throughout the year. Please if you have time take a look at their website, and maybe tell your friends about it, I have to thank them for the pictures of their’s I have used.

And finally well done to Russ who raised over £2000 by running the Marathon.