Diocesan News22 Mar 10

World Water Day - Belvoir Parish 'Queues for the Loo'

Belfast parishioners queue for the loo for World Water Day

After morning worship on Sunday 21st March, parishioners of Belvoir Parish Church (Down & Dromore Diocese) joined a queue with a difference - The World's Longest Toilet Queue. They joined with citizens from around the world in a Guinness World Record attempt to highlight the global sanitation and water crisis. Today, 22 March, is World Water Day. The theme of World Water Day 2010 is 'Clean Water for a Healthy World'.

For the Belvoir queue to be counted as part of the record they had to line up for a maximum of 10 minutes, but millions worldwide have waited years for their sanitation issues to be addressed. It’s estimated that 1.1 billion people still rely on unsafe drinking-water sources and that 4,000 children die every day as a result of poor sanitation.

Thousands of Toilet Queues organised under the ‘End of Water Poverty’ campaign umbrella have been organised to coincide with World Water Day. The timing is crucial, as just a month later the first high-level Meeting on Water and Sanitation will be held in Washington, DC. 

For the patiently queuing folk of Belvoir Parish, it was just one small way in which they felt they could push politicians to take action to end a global scandal.

ENDS