Gil Garcetti is known for his starring role as the District Attorney of Los Angeles County during the prosecution of the O.J. Simpson trial, as well as the executive producer for TNT’s hit, The Closer. But what he wants you to know about is his newfound passion, to bring clean water to the people of West Africa.
The Commonwealth Club of California has heeded the environmental call, and has dedicated the month of August to talks on water entitled, Cool Clear Water. The first in the series of talks, Water in the 21st Century, began with Garcetti followed by Dr. Peter Gleick, co-founder and President of the series’ co-sponsor, Pacific Institute, in Oakland. Gleick, an internationally recognized water expert, called a “visionary on the environment” by the BBC, received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work. The Conrad Hilton Foundation, who contributed close to forty million dollars in safe water projects in West Africa (the entire U.S. foreign systems program for water supply and sanitation in all of Africa was about twenty-five million dollars last year), has fully funded the publication of Garcetti’s book entitled, Water is Key. The book is a series of photographs illustrating the impact a safe water source can have on West African communities and shares its pages with poignant essays by some of the world’s top humanitarian leaders: Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (the first woman president in Africa); U.S. President, Jimmy Carter; Ireland President, Mary Robinson; United Nation Secretary-General, Kofi Annan; and African villagers. Garcetti and Gleick will spend the next year touring the country, with all proceeds from the book and photograph prints sales going to their cause.
Garcetti’s first trip to West Africa was in January 2001 to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the poorest nation in the world. What Garcetti witnessed, he said through a slideshow of his photographs, dramatically changed his life.
“The most, perhaps, meaningful thing that I learned, saw, and heard time and again was that over 70 percent of the people in these nations do not have safe water. There are consequences to not having safe water. Some of them are obvious: health problems, real health problems, continuous health problems, high infant mortality, certainly because the water, diarrhea, we can go on and on with this. Women are affected, girls are affected. Girls have to fetch the water, everyday, seven days a week. So girls don’t go to school. [When] girls don’t go to school, everyone suffers.”
In his photographer’s statement, which accompanies his black and white prints where 100 percent of the proceeds go to water projects led by NGOs in Africa, he writes,
“I also saw a practical reason to be involved in West Africa. Given the political times, I concluded that we need to be seen in the non-Christian world as truly carrying about these West African countries—Muslim countries.”
Garcetti also emphasized that it was due to the strength of the women in the villages that these water projects in West Africa were able to succeed. Most of the men have left to find work.
Garcetti explains: I was with a Peace Corps volunteer going into a village and I was looking for this woman in this little house. This is a huge village with 4,000 people. Sure enough, everyone knew her. I interviewed her and I said, “Tell me about your micro credit loaning. What is it?”
She said, “We sell goats.”
I said, “Oh, how long have you been doing it?”
“About six years.”
I said, “Oh, all right. Has it been successful?”
“Yeah, forty-one loans we’ve been doing.”
And I said, “How many animals are you selling?”
“Almost 6,000.”
“6,000! That’s a lot of money!”
She said, “Yes.”
“What do you do with all that money?”
“We built a school because in our community, when kids go to school, they have to wear the uniforms but families can’t afford the uniforms. We provide the uniforms. We keep money for emergencies. And we buy grains for when we run out of our food.”
