Oscar-nominated actor Richard E. Grant is supporting the Water Means Life appeal with WaterAid this winter, lending his distinctive voice to the international charity’s powerful appeal film. The Can You Ever Forgive Me? star, who is currently on tour promoting his heartfelt memoir A Pocketful of Happiness, highlighted the importance of WaterAid’s appeal in ensuring everyone is given the right to clean water.
The campaign aims to raise £2.5 million during its run from November 2022 to February 2023. Funds raised will provide life-saving clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene to health centres in Mozambique and around the world. Half of the healthcare facilities in the world’s least developed countries lack basic water services.
In support of the appeal, Richard recorded a compelling voiceover depicting the reality of being treated in a facility with equipment washed in contaminated water and no flushing toilets on-site. The film showcases a man sat in a bustling doctor’s waiting room in the UK as he watches a film featuring medical professionals in Mozambique going to great lengths to obtain water from a well to treat their patients. Meanwhile, a reel of patients, including a heavily pregnant woman and a mother with her poorly child, sit down around him. Richard’s voice is then heard over the images echoing how people are in the same position all over the world, with one stark difference, no access to critical clean water.
Speaking about the devastating realities of not having access to clean water, Richard said:
“Millions of people around the world have no choice but to visit and work in healthcare facilities with no clean water, no ability for equipment to be cleaned safely and no access to working toilets. It is shocking and needs urgent action to bring change. Clinics should be a safe space, and not a place where hardworking and committed doctors, nurses and cleaners are faced with the reality that without clean water their every effort to heal risks bringing harm. That is why I am supporting WaterAid’s appeal, because Water Means Life and life is precious.”
857 million people around the world have no water at their health centre. The efforts of passionate doctors and nurses, who work around the clock for their patients, go in vain because their lack of access to clean water leaves them both vulnerable to illness.
Dulce, a preventive medicine technician at the Meripo Health Centre, in Mozambique, explained how they are impacted in the hospital by not having access to running water. Dulce said:
“What motivated me to become a health worker is because I love saving lives. The situation of water here is not good, because in normal circumstances a hospital must have running water. Here, we do not have such, we only use that pump over there. Instead of having tap water in the toilets, at the entrance, we use buckets everywhere. If we had running water we could just turn on a tap, and wash our hands. [P]atients may come to the hospital to have their diseases cured, but instead leave here infected with some kind of disease.”
These diseases – and in many cases deaths – are preventable. Handwashing can reduce diarrheal diseases by up to 47% and can prevent a staggering 370,000 deaths caused by acute respiratory infections each year. Water can help break the cycle, WaterAid says.
See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdTR_k2C4h4