Three Avocados

There's a real debate about whether people from wealthy countries should travel to see poverty at all, and I think about it a lot. I've been to Uganda, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia and Peru, and seeing it firsthand is the specific thing that made me start Three Avocados and made my family give differently. The objection I take seriously is exploitation — if you're going to take pictures and video of people and use it for your own benefit, that's a real problem and I'm not defending it. But I don't agree that showing up to understand is itself exploitation. I think more Americans should go. No photograph has ever conveyed the smells and the sounds and the sheer scale of what I saw. And I don't know a single person who went and came back without making real changes to how they live and give. I'd honestly like to hear what you think about this one.

The clean water toolkit has changed a lot, and solar is the biggest reason. UNICEF's own account of why: solar-powered water systems can pump from deeper levels below the ground, so they keep producing during droughts and when shallow wells go dry. They keep running after storms, when other electrical systems are down. And unlike a traditional hand pump, a solar system can fill storage and serve several uses at once, which cuts walking and waiting time and makes it realistic to put real water into a school or a health center rather than a single spout in a field. This isn't theoretical or far off, either — Uganda's own government solar-powered water program has been commissioning village systems this year, with tens of thousands of residents now served.

"I ordered coffee to support my granddaughter's home country, Uganda. The coffee was wonderful, the delivery prompt, and I will order again. Soon." — Sally B., verified review. Thank you, Sally.

This is one of the wildest things I've ever been told on a trip. I went to El Salvador with Compassion International around 2016, back when the country was heavily controlled by two gangs. One of the places we visited was a local church doing community work, and the pastor told us this story: they kept chickens and used the eggs to supply the community. One morning the chickens were gone. All of them. The church was devastated. Two days later the local gang leader showed up with every single chicken and said, essentially, I'm sorry, one of our guys took these, I didn't realize they were yours, here they are. That's the part that stuck with me. The gang had enough respect for what that church was doing for their own community that they made sure the chickens made it back. It blew my mind, and it's a big part of why we work through local people who are already trusted where they live.

Here's a water-borne illness most people in the US have never heard of. WHO estimates about 20 million hepatitis E infections a year, 3.3 million of them with symptoms, transmitted mainly through contaminated drinking water. For the large majority of people it's self-limiting — you feel awful for two to six weeks and then you recover. WHO's fact sheet states that pregnant women who catch hepatitis E in the third trimester face a risk of death as high as 20–25%. Same water source, same virus, catastrophically different outcome depending on who drinks it. And WHO's own prevention list at the population level is two items long: maintain quality standards for public water supplies, and establish proper systems for disposing of human waste.