Since starting charity: water almost 10 years ago, I have come to see the link between hope and clean water in ways I’d never considered before.

First, the problem.

More than 663 million people worldwide lack access to this most basic need for life. For health.

Millions of women walk hours every single day to fetch water that makes them sick. Teenage girls miss out on school because their job carrying water for the family takes precedence over learning.

But this problem is being solved every single day, and more than a million people that make up the generous charity: water community have been donating, and are now bringing hope in the form of clean water to an average of more than 2,500 people every single day.

Imagine this. You’ve never had clean water before in your life. You are one of the 663 million people walking hours for dirty water.

Then one day, you hear the distant thundering of a drilling rig. A few moments later, almost $1M of heavy equipment – the rig, compressors, trucks – thunders into your remote village.

Local hydrologists and technicians jump out and start preparing the machinery. You gather around with the other families and you watch this noisy endeavor. Dust, dirt gravel and rock fly everywhere.

Twenty-four hours there, s’later nothing to show for all the noise and dust but the drilling team is still at it.

And then, in a moment, you see the water. It’s muddy at first, but then begins to clean as the team begins flushing the well. Huge plumes of clean water shoot up almost 100 feet into the sky.

You join the other families singing and dancing. In a celebration of wonder and gratitude.

You know that the hours you used to walk to the dirty swamp are a thing of the past. You know that life will be different now that they’ve found clean water a few hundred feet beneath your village. To you, hope now looks like clean water.