Austinites refuse to wash for a cause

AUSTIN (KXAN) - This story begins and ends with a lawyer joke. You see, young Austinite Sarah Evans spent three years in law school and got her degree. What she learned there, however, was that she does not want to be a lawyer. She actually figured that out after just one year.

“I don’t like quitting things, so I kept on,” she said.

If Evans is hard-headed, though, she is equally “mushy-hearted.”

“I was born on a hippie commune in New South Wales, Australia,” she said. “And so my formative years were spent singing happy songs and swimming in the river and plucking fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden and fighting off kangaroos. My parents lived there for almost eleven years and they reared my brother and me to really kind of live with our hearts. And I’m so, so grateful for that because I think that it has enabled me to accomplish a lot of different things in my life.”

That mushy heart was front and center when Evans’ friend, Brio Yiapan returned from a trip to Africa. Yiapan was born in Kenya to a black father who was part of the Maasai tribe and a white American mother. When she was two, the family made its way to the United States. When she got old enough to travel on her own, she set out to discover her roots.

Her reunion with her grandmother, who hadn’t seen her since she was a baby, was overwhelming.

“She just came running out of her little house, waving her arms with a few other women,” said Yiapan, “waving their arms and sort of crying and rejoicing and she just hugged me and kissed me.”

Later, though, visiting some cousins, aunts and uncles in the drought-stricken southern part of the country, she agreed to go along on a water haul.

“We went to a muddy hole in the ground some ways off, you know, kind of like a pond, but it was just stagnant, muddy all around,” said Yiapan. “And they went in there and filled up their water buckets.”

Around her, cattle, the livelihood of the Maasai, died of thirst on the barren landscape.

Such were the stories Yiapan passed on to her friend back in Austin.

“I was surprised that I just had no idea that this was going on in another part of the world because I felt like I keep myself pretty abreast of conditions, especially people that are in need, but I had no idea,” said Evans. “I mean the information was readily available to me but I did not know. So when she started telling me about it I was shocked and I was sort of disappointed in kind of, us as a culture for not being aware and wanting to do something. It's something that's so basically important to human life and these are other human beings that are just around the globe from us who are dying because they don't have access to water. This didn't make sense to me,” she added, biting her lip and holding back tears.

Together, Evans and Yiapan launched a non-profit organization called Well Aware to raise money for the drilling of water wells in the Maasai region. They also recruited another friend, Sarah Nemec-Nelson, to help. She’s the one who came up with the idea for a unique fund-raiser.

“I don't feel like I should have a lot of credit for it because it was poking fun at some of the people in our group,” said Nemec-Nelson. “They're free lancers and they are self-employed and so their bathing habits aren't quite so frequent. And I was saying if we just took some time off showering, it would be like normal everyday for you. And it really was a joke and everyone was like, ‘That's a great idea.’ And I was like, ‘No,’ and here we are.”

Where we are is in the middle of a “shower strike.” Thirty-five volunteers have vowed to avoid washing until they have each raised $1,000. $35,000 would pay for a new water well in the middle of the Maasai territory. It would be drilled by Bee Cave Drilling Companyof Dripping Springs, Texas, a firm that includes mission work in its operation.

“We know it's not the most ideal of economies,” said Evans, “and we know that it's really going to take a lot of getting in people's faces to get people to want to give to a cause, even though it's such an important cause. Right now everybody's really scared.

Yet people are responding.

“We actually have people who don't even live in Texas who just are attracted to this,” said Evans, “and they say, ‘Okay, I'm going to email people and tell them I'm striking and I'm going to get the money.’ It’s a different approach, but we’ve been really pleased.”

“If you could get away with this anywhere, it's in Austin,” said Nemec-Nelson. We're weird; we like weird things; this is not your traditional bike ride.”

But if Well Aware is selling the novelty of the Shower Strike, at the heart of the effort is the cause, itself.

“We have 30,000 people who will receive clean drinking water for a lifetime,” said Yiapan. “And when you break down the cost of the well, it comes to about $1.50 per person to provide clean drinking water for a lifetime. You know, that's so doable and when you think about it in terms like that, it's like, yeah, we may be in a recession; things may be hard right now, but we can all afford to give $1.50, you know, $5.00 or whatever. We're not looking for people to turn over hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's just everyone coming together can do something for people for the rest of their life.

As for Sarah Evans and her mushy heart, there’s this:

“It's not always easy living with your heart because it also makes you really sensitive and emotional,” she said, ‘but for the most part, I'm an advocate.”

And if she wasn’t sensitive and emotional?

“I'd be practicing law,” she said.

Ba-dump-bump!