Samaritan's Purse at the Ideal Home Show

Me, with one of those wonderful
£48 Water Filters that provide
clean, safe water for life!

 I was asked to attend the Ideal Home Show for Samaritan's Purse ...no that's not quite true - I offered. Well, it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down. I'd not been to the show since I was a Convent School girl way back in the 60s so I was looking forward to being part of it - although I realised that I wouldn't see much in my hour lunch break.

Our attending this show was an idea that came about because we need to reach a new audience. We have been attending Christian events such as Spring Harvest and New Wine and had many enthusiastic people visit the stand, but that was the trouble - most already knew about us and our work. So reaching out to a secular audience made sense.

The stand was well designed and depicted one of the recipients of our Water Filters with the caption "This is my Ideal Home". We had a bio-sand water filter there - rigged to show clean water tumbling out of it into a bucket, lots of leaflets and a full briefing on what to say.

Despite the fact that many of the people at the show were there to look at things which would improve their own lives (me included I think!) it was surprising how many meaningful conversations we had with people. The world is a small place and I met many folk who had had first hand experience about the lack of clean water in the world. Those who didn't or who thought we were flogging a new kind of water feature for their garden (well, we were on the edge of the Ideal Garden section!) were really shocked by the statistics - 1 in 8 people in the world don't have access to water and every 20 seconds a child dies because of lack of clean water.

Things I don't know after this particular exercise - how many people will act on what they discovered about Samaritan's Purse's work, how much extra money we will raise and why the level of water in the bucket slowly disappeared.....!