9-year-old Rachel Beckwith started raising money for drinking water for the poor population of Africa. The girl died in a car accident but her last wish rescued 60 thousand people!
Rachel’s first charity initiative was to donate her hair for the wigs of children sick with leukemia. After that the manager of the charity fund “Charity: Water”, Scott Harrison, visited with the lecture. He spoke how people suffer from lack of drinking water in Africa’s poor countries. Rachel was touched by the shots where poor people drank from dirty puddles. At the lecture the girl learned that contaminated water caused a lot of deadly infections.
To save money, Rachel refused to celebrate her birthday and instead of presents she asked her friends to donate money to her own site created in the charity fund. She raised money for digging wells of drinking water for people without drinking water. According to the calculation of the fund Rachel should raise 300 USD to save 15 people.
On her birthday and presents she raised 220 USD – Rachel had no time to do more... In half a month after creating the site in the fund a big car accident happened – 13 vehicle pile-up. Dozens of people were delivered to hospitals. Among them was Rachel who could not be rescued. She was attached to artificial respiratory system but she didn’t come to mind. In the meantime relatives and friends donated small sums of money on Rachel’s account. The amount of donations started to grow and it attracted the society’s attention. Unfortunately, in half a month it was obvious for the doctors that Rachel would never come to and turned off her life support... The girl’s last wish – to raise money for drinking water for people in Africa became known to thousands of Americans.
“The campaign of raising the money for Africans was known in Rachel’s Church and in several days it was possible to raise more than 100 thousand USD. Afterwards whole Seattle was involved – 300 thousands, 400 thousands and we could not understand what was going on”, - the manager of the fund Scott Harrison says. Thousands of people from all over the world wrote exciting letters. Children of other countries followed Rachel’s example and asked their parents to transfer money to assist African people. When collecting money ended it turned out that 31 997 people transferred 1 265 823 USD.
“I’m just blown away by the overwhelming love and support and response. It is a great pain and happiness at the same time”, - mother of the girl, Samantha Paul said.