CGA junior raises money to help bring clean water to developing countries

Oct. 19, 2023

Culver Girls Academy junior Alexandrine Harig was looking to make a ripple in the effort to get clean water to developing countries. Those ripples are becoming waves.

Harig, from Deerfield, Illinois, has helped raise money for two water wells in Kenya and to provide numerous water filters to families in countries in Central and South America and Africa. She has raised more than $12,000 for clean water on her own and working with “Water for Life Charity” she has helped raise more than $30,000 overall.

Harig said her interest in water insecurity started in fifth grade when her teacher gave her class the assignment of getting salt out of salt water to make it safe to drink. That led her to research other reasons people didn’t have access to clean drinking water. The United Nations estimates that 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to clean drinking water.

“My 10-year-old-self said, ‘I’m going to do something about this,’ ” she said.

Harig looked for organizations working on the issue. But most were large, and she didn’t know how she could help. That’s when she found the “Water for Life Charity” website with founder James Brown’s telephone number. She called him.

“He told me for a $30 donation he could send a filter to a community that needed it,” Harig said.

He told her the filter would provide more than 100,000 gallons of clean water and remove 99.999 percent of diseases.

She called a restaurant in Deerfield and asked if she could play harp for customers for tips. They agreed and she raised the $30. She sent the money in and thought that might be about the end of her contribution.

Then Brown sent her a picture of the water filter she paid for being sent to Peru. He then sent a picture of the orphanage that received the water filter.

“Once I got those pictures and saw that these are the people that it's helping, that my $30 helped get that filter there, I knew I wanted to do more,” she said.

She started making hand-painted cards to sell and playing harp at five area businesses to raise money. Water for Life Charity sent her photos of dehydrated babies she was helping in Guatemala.

She met Brown when she was invited to a Water for Life Charity event in San Diego to receive its 2019 Youth Humanitarian Award at its annual gala. She also had donated a painting to be auctioned. The painting raised $2,500.

“It was crazy,” she said. “Going to the gala and then meeting all those people made me just want to do so much more.”

The next year she created another painting that would be used as a “thank you” for a donor who gave $8,000 for a well in Kenya. A second donor gave another $8,000 for a second well in Kenya, so Harig created another painting.

Water for Life Charity sent Harig videos of those wells being installed.

“Every time I do something I'll get a picture back or I'll meet someone else who's working for the charity, it just makes me want to keep doing more. Because no matter how much I do, there's still this problem that is so big. There's still so much help that needs to be done,” Harig said.

In the summer of 2022, she wrote and illustrated a children’s book called, “Not Perfect? Perfect!”

She self-published the book in April. When she speaks at an event, she sells the book for $15, with all the money going to the charity.

She said her parents, Kevin and Claudine, paid for the cost of publishing the book so all the proceeds go to Water for Life Charity.

 “I’m fortunate they are so supportive,” she said.

She went to Guatemala with Water for Life Charity this past summer, accompanied by her mother, to distribute filters and to show people how to use the filters. She describes the trip as “eye-opening.”

“That made everything so much more real,” Harig said. “Seeing in person the impact it has is so much more meaningful.”

Harig couldn’t believe the poor quality of the water she saw people drinking. Some places the water was brown. In other places, the water looked clear but it wasn’t safe to drink.

“It has bacteria and diseases in it,” she said.

She said in Kenya people get drinking water from muddy rivers that people wash clothes in and contain human waste.

She hopes her efforts will help allow girls to go to school instead of spending their days walking miles to collect water.

 In Guatemala, Harig instructed the mothers in Spanish how to use the filters. Harig said while she isn’t fluent in Spanish, she speaks the language well enough to communicate.

She is now taking Honors in Spanish and her Honors project is on contaminated water in Guatemala.

She recently spoke to about 270 people at the National Charity League’s Wilmette, Illinois, chapter at the Evanston Golf Club and raised $2,400.

Harig said she is inspired by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a groundbreaking lawyer before joining the high court. She filed more than 20 Supreme Court briefs related to women’s rights and argued six cases before the court. She won five.

“She was about the ripples it would make. She was about the actions now, but it’s also about the ripples that they make,” Harig said.

Harig said she tries to take the same approach of trying to make ripples and trying to inspire others.

“I do feel like I've done something to help. It's amazing to be a part of something that's so much bigger than myself,” she said.