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In summer 2008, between finishing high school and entering college, I went to Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) with a group of students and teachers from the high school. Not only did I get to visit some amazing cities and temples and museums, I also found my life calling: water resources and water quality. I know that sounds really cliche, “life calling”, but this trip really did change my life, in many ways I’m still feeling to this day.
Somewhere in-between Cambodia and Vietnam (literally, somewhere, as we took the most sketch boat voyage in the middle of a lighting storm to the Vietnamese border), I started to get sick. Really sick. I’ll spare you the gruesome details (I’ll leave that for you to Wikipedia, though be warned, it’s gross), but it was like the worst stomach flu ever.
When I got back to the States, my mom took me to an urgent care facility and they told me I must have had dysentery. Dysen-WHAT? For those of you 90s kids, it’s that disease that characters would get in the Oregon Trail computer game. But I had never heard of anyone in real life getting it in this day and age, let alone would I image that I myself would get it.
It baffled me that, despite being so deliberate in drinking only bottled water, I could still get sick. It was even crazier to think that, while I can turn on the tap in my house and get safe water, someone could not have that luxury. They could get dysentery multiple times a year. And if without proper remedies, dysentery CAN KILL YOU.
So, that amazing trip sealed the deal for me. I was already planning to go the UC Berkeley for Environmental Engineering Science, but it was that trip that inspired me to focus on water resources. It was that trip that pushed me to take the Earth Lovers 3-Minute Shower challenge, to do all I can to conserve our natural resource and the safe water we are so lucky to have access to.
So what’s your motive behind taking the shower challenge?