The Real Story - Inspiration Behind 'Tripina Finds Fresh Water'

I remember distinctly the first time I visited Ethiopia in 2015. I was travelling in the back of a jeep, snapping photos on a DSLR, collecting stills of what struck me as snapshots of every day life there. There were little boy shepherds as young as 5, herding their little goats. One boy no taller than a 9-year-old stopped to wave as I smiled at him. He was carrying a lamb on his shoulder, tenderly. As the jeep rolled on on off-track mud roads filled with potholes and muddy water puddles after a rain, I saw specks of bright yellow in the distance. It was then that I registered - there was a little girl stooped over a muddy water puddle, filling her little jerry can and plastic water bottle. This was the water she was going to drink, and bring home. Even typing this, my heart aches, in the very same way it ached in 2015.

Later, I met a mother whose eyes and smile I will always carry in my heart. She had a gentleness I had never encountered before. She looked at me like she was bursting - she needed to share her story. She was a mother of two young girls. They walked to fetch water every day for the family. Each had to carry a 12kg jerry can on their back for a distance measured in time, not kilometres - they had to walk at least 2 hours for water, everyday, after midnight. They fetched water from a neighbouring village because they had no clean water source in their own, but had to go at a time when no one in that village would turn them away. Some nights, they would not go because they would hear too many hyenas in the pitch black darkness of the savannah. She looked at me in the eye and said, “I could not risk losing my girls, so we would go thirsty the next day.” They received a clean water well in their village that year, which transformed their lives. The girls could now go to school. They still walked, but 20 minutes, in day time, to the water well in the middle of their village.

The story of Tripina Finds Fresh Water is inspired by these stories. These people whose photos I took, whose hands I held - their stories, we must carry and tell, because what matters to them matters to all of us on such a fundamental level. It is our hope that in the story of Tripina Finds Fresh Water, caregivers will be able to broach themes like the lack of access to clean water, the thirst for education among girls in the developing world, but more importantly, the strength and courage of children who go through circumstances we cannot begin to imagine. And through that, we come together in deeper understanding, in deeper empathy for each other.

*Written by Rachel Nadia. Photos are stock photos and are not the real shots I took from my travels.