Exeter couple show how #ToiletsSaveLives

Neil and Alison Heard will head to the Glastonbury Festival with WaterAid this week to rally support for the charity’s #ToiletsSaveLives campaign that calls on world leaders to reach everyone, everywhere with taps and toilets.

The couple have supported WaterAid for many years, and this will be the third year they have volunteered at Glastonbury the charity. They will be working alongside an army of 470 dedicated WaterAid volunteers making a splash at Worthy Farm this year.

They said "We're really proud to have been selected again to represent WaterAid at Glastonbury. We're going to be working on the Bars Team, assisting the festival to run a pilot scheme to introduce reusable stainless steel cups, as well as promoting the #ToiletsSaveLives campaign. Access to safe water and improved sanitation really can transform lives. This will be a great opportunity to get festival-goers thinking about the realities of life without safe water and toilets and to help engage thousands of people in a cause we feel passionately about."

Last year, world leaders made the first ever commitment to reach everyone everywhere with clean water and safe toilets: Global Goal 6. Aside from working on the Bars Team, Neil and Alison and their fellow WaterAid volunteers are hoping to gather more than 40,000 signatures at the Glastonbury Festival for WaterAid’s #ToiletsSaveLives petition, which calls on David Cameron to explain how he plans to turn the promise of Goal 6 into a reality. The charity wants the UK government to provide a clear plan, backed with money to make it happen.

Without home comforts - whether queuing to get a drink, waiting to use the toilet, or not being as clean as they’d like to be - festival-goers can start to understand what it’s like for more than 650 million people living without clean water and the 2.3 billion people with nowhere safe to go to the toilet.

WaterAid volunteers will be giving out drinking water to festival-goers, collecting rubbish for recycling, manning the toilets, as well as helping manage the pilot scheme to introduce reusable stainless steel cups. Each WaterAid volunteer works shifts of four to six hours a day – the same amount of time many in the developing world spend collecting water, leaving little time for education.

For more information and to contribute to WaterAid’s #ToiletsSaveLives campaign go to: www.wateraid.org/uk/toiletssavelives