It's hard to imagine what it's like to not have clean water to drink.  Water is not evenly divided around the world.  Some places have lots and others have very little.  Water supply is a big problem in some countries.  We found a site that really showed us how things were in Africa, written by people who live there.  If you click here, you can visit it, too.   This Peace Corps site showed us that water supply can be very different all across the globe.  Some people in Africa carry water from a hole that is bored or dug into the ground.  This water source might not even be in their town and they will have to travel to get it.  Some kids wrote about how they have dirty water at their school and sometimes kids get sick from drinking it.  We wonder what we can do about this.
     We thought that the United States didn't have any of those problems but we were wrong.  Appalachia, in the southern part of the United States, has some homes that still don't have running water.
     In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project gets water piped in from the Colorado River.  This is a problem for the places that used to get most of the Colorado River water because they can't get as much now.  There are rules about how much water can be taken out of rivers.  Some rivers in the West have reached that limit.  There are 'water wars' where people argue over who has the right to use the water.
    The problem of water supply keeps a lot of people looking for new ways to use water better.  Every time we use it, we take water away from the Earth.  We now know how it flows on the surface and underground until it gets to us.  If we don't spend that extra five minutes in the shower, or run the water when we brush our teeth, we can make a difference!