

Lencha Midija
295 people
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“I can’t provide for my family the way I would like due to illnesses from the water we drink.” - Jamila
Lencha Midija, Ethiopia, Africa
- Story
- Plan
- FAQ's
Life in Lencha Midija: Jamila’s Story
September 2019
Each day, Jamila returns from fetching water and sets her water container on the ground. She peers into the dark brown water and sifts through it to check for parasites.
A few months ago, Jamila swallowed a leech from drinking the river water near Lencha Midija village. After a painful and expensive recovery, she is finally better. Still, she and her community have no choice but to continue drinking the water.
Jamila, her husband, Abdela, and their one-year-old daughter live in Lencha Midija village. Jamila is 19 years old, and twice a day, she journeys to the river to gather water.
When she isn’t filling her container with contaminated water, Jamila is tending to their coffee farm, feeding her daughter, and cleaning her home.
When the rains cease and the river dries up, life becomes even more challenging. During those long months, Jamila walks for over an hour to find water.
“I can’t provide for my family the way I would like due to illnesses from the water we drink and the time we spend in search of water every day,” Jamila said.
The young mother wants a big family, but the water problem in her community worries her. All her life, she’s watched children suffer from waterborne illnesses. They cry, they cannot run and play as they should, and they miss many days of school.
Most girls in her community dropped out before reaching secondary school.
“I know the value of getting educated,” Jamila said. “I have a strong desire to send my children to school when they grow up.”
With safe water, Jamila knows that children in her community can be healthy. Safe water and improved health will give them opportunities that they have never known.
“I wish we could have clean water and live healthy and happy,” she added.
You can help Jamila’s family and others in Lencha Midija village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Lencha Midija village today.
Lencha Midija is in a very remote region of Ethiopia
View Interactive Map
This village is on its way to becoming a Healthy Village. The process takes approximately 24 months from start to finish. You can follow along with the progress below.
Here’s the Plan for Lencha Midija:

Project Ready
Villages are carefully selected by Lifewater staff and wait for program work to begin in their area.
Healthy Village
Great news! Lencha Midija is now a certified Healthy Village. That means the safe water source is complete and more than 90% of the community’s homes are healthy. That is a new future for 295 children and families.

Water Project FAQs
When you sponsor a water project, you are helping bring lasting change. Your gift provides:
- House-to-house hygiene and sanitation education
- Custom engineered water source
- Construction of a safe water source
- Community engagement by Lifewater field staff to ensure change lasts
Lifewater also provides:
- Monitoring and evaluation of the project with real-time updates to donors
- Local church partnerships that equip the church to be the hands and feet of Jesus
- Five-year water source maintenance and sustainability (funded by beneficiary communities on a volunteer basis)
Yes! The village you are helping is a real village. All families photographed or shared from the project page have given their permission to have their information shared with you.
Lifewater has local staff that live and serve among the communities and schools where Lifewater works. Our staff know the language and the culture and are best equipped to serve communities. Because we seek to ensure sustainable water projects and community buy in, we do not allow donors to visit the projects they sponsor. However, we do commit to sending real-time updates, photos, and stories from the projects themselves.
With more than 40 years’ experience, LIfewater is the longest-running Christian clean water charity in North America. Over those 40 years, Lifewater has worked in more than 45 different countries. Currently, our work is focused in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia).
Lifewater identifies countries and regions that are unreached and underserved with basic water access and sanitation, which means we focus on areas where other organizations are not serving.
Although great strides have been made in the past 20 years to solve the global water crisis, remote and rural populations still remain unreached with adequate water and sanitation. These distant regions are difficult and often costly for governments and NGOs to serve well. Many of these communities feel as though they have been forgotten.
Currently, Lifewater has programs in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cambodia. You can go to lifewater.org/projects to select a specific water project to help. Because our programs are regionalized and made in partnership with the local governments, we are not able to take requests for specific water projects outside of our existing programs.
Lifewater budgets 80% of expenditures for programs. The remaining 20% is split between administrative/management and fundraising expenses. This ratio is best in class for nonprofits and is why Lifewater has received the highest rating from Charity Navigator.
Administrative/management expenses are used to ensure that we are effective in managing the funds entrusted to us and include the following types of expenses: accounting personnel, leadership time, professional development of staff, external auditors, legal counsel, government registration expenses in every U.S. state, credit card fees for processing donations, bank fees, database maintenance, and office expenses.
Fundraising expenses generate the income needed to do the work that we set out to do. These include the cost of direct mail appeals and communication, marketing projects, donor relations personnel, and email communication systems. Last year, every dollar invested into Lifewater fundraising efforts resulted in $10 of donation for the organization.
Over our 40 year history, Lifewater has received the highest accreditations from the most respected rating organization in the industry. Lifewater is recognized as one of the top-rated charities in the United States by independent reporting organizations, including:
- Charity Navigator (four stars)
- Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)
- Guidestar (Platinum)
- Great Nonprofits (five star)
- Excellence in Giving
Learn more at https://lifewater.org/top-rated-charity.
Lifewater’s work is founded on the belief that every person is made in the image of God. It is with this conviction that we seek out the globe’s most unreached, marginalized people groups in need of safe water.
Both nationally and internationally, 100 percent of our staff are Christians. These Christian staff help facilitate Lifewater’s Healthy Church strategy in communities. And, where there are no churches, we work with church planting partners to start new churches.
To create Healthy Churches, Lifewater first trains church leaders in foundational theology. These leaders are equipped with the basic story of the Christian faith and the biblical mandate to love others. Leaders learn that stopping the spread of disease and caring for the vulnerable aligns with our responsibility as Christians to love our neighbor.
Second, Lifewater ensures churches have safe bathrooms on their premises, handwashing stations, clean water nearby, and the education to promote health within their congregations. It’s imperative that churches are early adopters of healthy hygiene practices.
Third, Lifewater encourages churches to help vulnerable households become Healthy Homes. Church leaders undergo a training to become WASH (water access, sanitation, and hygiene) advocates in their communities. These advocates are encouraged to identify widows, child-headed households, the elderly, and the disabled to help them meet the health standards of Lifewater’s programs.
Lifewater’s Vision of a Healthy Village strategy is a relationship-first method. This model transforms entire regions house by house, village by village, and school by school. It is among the most intensive household-level work happening in the entire developing world and is closely tracked for progress, sustainability, and overall impact.
We construct custom-engineered safe water sources and teach life-saving health and sanitation practices in local villages and schools in need.
Story
Life in Lencha Midija: Jamila’s Story
September 2019
Each day, Jamila returns from fetching water and sets her water container on the ground. She peers into the dark brown water and sifts through it to check for parasites.
A few months ago, Jamila swallowed a leech from drinking the river water near Lencha Midija village. After a painful and expensive recovery, she is finally better. Still, she and her community have no choice but to continue drinking the water.
Jamila, her husband, Abdela, and their one-year-old daughter live in Lencha Midija village. Jamila is 19 years old, and twice a day, she journeys to the river to gather water.
When she isn’t filling her container with contaminated water, Jamila is tending to their coffee farm, feeding her daughter, and cleaning her home.
When the rains cease and the river dries up, life becomes even more challenging. During those long months, Jamila walks for over an hour to find water.
“I can’t provide for my family the way I would like due to illnesses from the water we drink and the time we spend in search of water every day,” Jamila said.
The young mother wants a big family, but the water problem in her community worries her. All her life, she’s watched children suffer from waterborne illnesses. They cry, they cannot run and play as they should, and they miss many days of school.
Most girls in her community dropped out before reaching secondary school.
“I know the value of getting educated,” Jamila said. “I have a strong desire to send my children to school when they grow up.”
With safe water, Jamila knows that children in her community can be healthy. Safe water and improved health will give them opportunities that they have never known.
“I wish we could have clean water and live healthy and happy,” she added.
You can help Jamila’s family and others in Lencha Midija village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Lencha Midija village today.
Plan
Lencha Midija is in a very remote region of Ethiopia
View Interactive Map
This village is on its way to becoming a Healthy Village. The process takes approximately 24 months from start to finish. You can follow along with the progress below.
Here’s the Plan for Lencha Midija:

Project Ready
Villages are carefully selected by Lifewater staff and wait for program work to begin in their area.
Healthy Village
Great news! Lencha Midija is now a certified Healthy Village. That means the safe water source is complete and more than 90% of the community’s homes are healthy. That is a new future for 295 children and families.

FAQ's
Water Project FAQs
When you sponsor a water project, you are helping bring lasting change. Your gift provides:
- House-to-house hygiene and sanitation education
- Custom engineered water source
- Construction of a safe water source
- Community engagement by Lifewater field staff to ensure change lasts
Lifewater also provides:
- Monitoring and evaluation of the project with real-time updates to donors
- Local church partnerships that equip the church to be the hands and feet of Jesus
- Five-year water source maintenance and sustainability (funded by beneficiary communities on a volunteer basis)
Yes! The village you are helping is a real village. All families photographed or shared from the project page have given their permission to have their information shared with you.
Lifewater has local staff that live and serve among the communities and schools where Lifewater works. Our staff know the language and the culture and are best equipped to serve communities. Because we seek to ensure sustainable water projects and community buy in, we do not allow donors to visit the projects they sponsor. However, we do commit to sending real-time updates, photos, and stories from the projects themselves.
With more than 40 years’ experience, LIfewater is the longest-running Christian clean water charity in North America. Over those 40 years, Lifewater has worked in more than 45 different countries. Currently, our work is focused in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia).
Lifewater identifies countries and regions that are unreached and underserved with basic water access and sanitation, which means we focus on areas where other organizations are not serving.
Although great strides have been made in the past 20 years to solve the global water crisis, remote and rural populations still remain unreached with adequate water and sanitation. These distant regions are difficult and often costly for governments and NGOs to serve well. Many of these communities feel as though they have been forgotten.
Currently, Lifewater has programs in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cambodia. You can go to lifewater.org/projects to select a specific water project to help. Because our programs are regionalized and made in partnership with the local governments, we are not able to take requests for specific water projects outside of our existing programs.
Lifewater budgets 80% of expenditures for programs. The remaining 20% is split between administrative/management and fundraising expenses. This ratio is best in class for nonprofits and is why Lifewater has received the highest rating from Charity Navigator.
Administrative/management expenses are used to ensure that we are effective in managing the funds entrusted to us and include the following types of expenses: accounting personnel, leadership time, professional development of staff, external auditors, legal counsel, government registration expenses in every U.S. state, credit card fees for processing donations, bank fees, database maintenance, and office expenses.
Fundraising expenses generate the income needed to do the work that we set out to do. These include the cost of direct mail appeals and communication, marketing projects, donor relations personnel, and email communication systems. Last year, every dollar invested into Lifewater fundraising efforts resulted in $10 of donation for the organization.
Over our 40 year history, Lifewater has received the highest accreditations from the most respected rating organization in the industry. Lifewater is recognized as one of the top-rated charities in the United States by independent reporting organizations, including:
- Charity Navigator (four stars)
- Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)
- Guidestar (Platinum)
- Great Nonprofits (five star)
- Excellence in Giving
Learn more at https://lifewater.org/top-rated-charity.
Lifewater’s work is founded on the belief that every person is made in the image of God. It is with this conviction that we seek out the globe’s most unreached, marginalized people groups in need of safe water.
Both nationally and internationally, 100 percent of our staff are Christians. These Christian staff help facilitate Lifewater’s Healthy Church strategy in communities. And, where there are no churches, we work with church planting partners to start new churches.
To create Healthy Churches, Lifewater first trains church leaders in foundational theology. These leaders are equipped with the basic story of the Christian faith and the biblical mandate to love others. Leaders learn that stopping the spread of disease and caring for the vulnerable aligns with our responsibility as Christians to love our neighbor.
Second, Lifewater ensures churches have safe bathrooms on their premises, handwashing stations, clean water nearby, and the education to promote health within their congregations. It’s imperative that churches are early adopters of healthy hygiene practices.
Third, Lifewater encourages churches to help vulnerable households become Healthy Homes. Church leaders undergo a training to become WASH (water access, sanitation, and hygiene) advocates in their communities. These advocates are encouraged to identify widows, child-headed households, the elderly, and the disabled to help them meet the health standards of Lifewater’s programs.
Lifewater’s Vision of a Healthy Village strategy is a relationship-first method. This model transforms entire regions house by house, village by village, and school by school. It is among the most intensive household-level work happening in the entire developing world and is closely tracked for progress, sustainability, and overall impact.
We construct custom-engineered safe water sources and teach life-saving health and sanitation practices in local villages and schools in need.
Your gift reflects your trust in Lifewater International. We commit to honor your generosity by using your gift to help further the mission and vision of Lifewater International. Your donation is used by Lifewater International according to the project objectives to provide safe drinking water and improved sanitation and hygiene within the specified program area. Lifewater International is a charitable organization as described in 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, registered in the United States. All donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.
Donations are non-refundable. Lifewater International will honor a donor’s request for any pre-approved program or project whenever possible. In rare occasions where this is not possible, gifts will be used where needed, in accordance with the organization’s charitable purpose. In accordance with this policy, donor’s explicitly release Lifewater International from further restriction on such funds.
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