A Love Letter to Water 4 Mercy

I won't deny it. When I first became involved with Water 4 Mercy, it felt like something my mom, Amy, was doing and passionate about,

and I was showing up because it was

hers. For a while, Water 4 Mercy existed

for me the way a lot of things exist when

you're young and a little removed from

them: a folder of photos, a string of

videos, a scroll of updates. I'd see the

wells, the villages, the smiling faces, and

think, wow, they're doing so much. What

an awesome organization.Something

happening far away, started by Nermine

Rubin, who I have known since I was

born.

And then I was lucky enough to be

included on a donor trip with my mother

and my siblings. That's where I met

Swailii Mchuluza Mgem and Leah

Samson Mtoro, and where I saw what

their village calls the Black Mamba pit.

I can still see it if I close my eyes.

Twenty-five feet down, straight into the earth, the kind of hole you'd only dig if you had no other choice. Swailii and Leah climbed down into it, along with a third woman, holding onto each other's hands and passing buckets of unsafe water up the clay wall, one hand to the next, all the way to the surface. I've never seen anything that demanded that much strength, balance, and trust in another person, over and over, just to bring water home.

To me, that was indescribable. I don't want to pretend I have the right words for it, even now, because I don't think there are any. What I can say is that it stopped being a distant thought or another Instagram reel at that moment. It stopped being my mom's thing, or an organization I was peripherally attached to, or a good cause I nodded along to. Watching Swailii, Leah, and the woman beside them made it real in a way no video ever had. This wasn't a demonstration of hardship. It was their daily reality, done

with a skill and endurance that most of us will never have to build.

But Water 4 Mercy isn't only about the fact that women like Swailii and Leah no longer have to climb into pits like that one for water. It's about what comes after. Nermine calls it "HOPE." For a long time, I understood that word the way I understood the organization itself: from a distance, as a nice idea. But on that trip, I saw what it actually looks like.

Hope was a woman from Puhi Village who decided to use the water for more than survival. She took clay from her own village, mixed it with water, and began shaping it into bowls, turning the very thing she once had to risk her safety for into the foundation of a small business. Water didn't just keep her family alive. It gave her something to build upon, on her own terms, for her own future.

That's the thing about proximity. You can watch a hundred videos about the water crisis and understand it intellectually. You can know the numbers, know that people walk miles for water that isn't even clean, know that girls miss school because fetching water is their job instead. But there is a difference between knowing something and seeing it. There's a difference between understanding a crisis and watching Swailii and Leah descend into the Black Mamba pit because it was the only way their village survived the day, and then meeting a woman in another village who took that same water and clay and built something entirely her own.

I think about Nermine differently now, too. I've known her my whole life, but watching her walk alongside these communities, not from behind a desk, not from a distance, but actually there, in the dust, in the heat, in the pits, showed me something about her I hadn't fully grasped before. This was never a hobby or a passion project for her. It was, and is, a calling. She saw something in those villages that she couldn't walk away from, and she built an entire organization, clean water, sustainable agriculture, and education, around the belief that dignity shouldn't be a privilege reserved for people lucky enough to be born somewhere with running water.

Water 4 Mercy's whole model exists because of women like Swailii, Leah, and the woman in Puhi Village. Solar-powered wells so no one has to climb into a pit like the Black Mamba again. Drip irrigation so families can grow food instead of just searching for water. Education so the next generation doesn't have to choose between school and survival. None of it is a "band-aid. It's not water for a day. It's water, and hope, for good

So this is my love letter, to the organization, to Nermine, to my mom for bringing me along, and most of all to Swailii, Leah, and every woman I met on that trip whose strength, skill, and resilience rewired the way I see this work entirely. Water 4 Mercy isn't an "awesome organization" from a distance anymore. It's personal. And I hope that as this work continues, it's their names, not mine, that people remember.

If you ever have the opportunity to join a donor trip and see this work for yourself, go. I was lucky enough to be brought along, and I came home understanding something that no folder of photos, string of videos, or scroll of updates could have taught me