Jozy Altidore, a US soccer player, started the Jozy Altidore Foundation at the age of 19 to bring fresh water to the people of Haiti.
Even before the January 2010 earthquake left Haiti in ruins and killed scores, Altidore felt called to help:
“I wanted to [help] but I was so young and my career was just starting,” said Altidore, whose parents are Haitian. “But when the earthquake hit, it just took the wind out of me and I felt at that moment that I had to do something.”
Altidore’s dream is to bring clean water to the nearly 5 million Haitians, almost half of the nation, who do not have access to clean drinking water.
“To get fresh water, clean water in Haiti, it’s very hard,” he said. “They have a lot of contamination issues. They’re just cut off from fresh water and a lot of them have to walk miles before they can even reach fresh water.”
The Jozy Altidore Foundation has teamed up with Generosity Water, a non-profit organisation that has installed 561 water wells across the globe, and which currently has 55 projects in Haiti and has committed to doing an additional 20 wells within a year, by donating money to it.
The people of Haiti are already benefitting from the donations from the Jozy Altidore Foundation – the first well is already providing fresh drinking water for over five hundred people, and Jozy says that this is just the beginning. His hope is that over the next twenty years or so there will be sufficient wells so that there is no problems with fresh drinking water and that people will go to Haiti on vacation and return with only good things to say about it, including about the drinking water.
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