The following post was written by Lynn Mott, Living Water Project Board Member, about her childhood on a farm, where her family’s water didn’t magically come from a tap drawn from a city’s waterworks.

I grew up on a farm that was miles from the nearest water line, so water was always a problem. We were always scared of running out, but I didn’t realize how blessed we were.

My family was far from rich, but we had resources to deal with the problem. My father was able to drill wells, run a water line from a spring to the house, and install a cistern to collect and store rainwater. Even when those water sources all dried up during long summer droughts, we were able to buy water and have it delivered to the house.

Millions of people in this world aren’t so blessed. They live in remote villages where water is harder to find. Women and girls often must walk several miles to find a spring or other open source of water. Their water supply is limited to whatever they can carry. As they trudge home under the weight of a couple of buckets of water, they have no idea that plenty of fresh, clean groundwater usually is right beneath their feet.

Groundwater underlies the earth’s surface almost everywhere—beneath oceans, hills, valleys, mountains, lakes and even deserts. It’s not always easy to access, but the water is there, essentially everywhere, if you can dig deep enough.

That’s where The Living Water Project enters the picture. LWP teams identify likely spots to access groundwater near a village and provide well drillers, pipe and pumps to make that water more readily available to villagers.