In 2017, a month after the inauguration of Echoes of India's third water purification plant in Nellore district, the organisation received a handwritten letter from a village mother. It was translated from Telugu and shared with the team.
We have reproduced it here, with her permission, as she wrote it. Her name has been changed to protect her privacy.
From
Lakshmi Devi (name changed)
Gurampadutanda Village, Nellore District
Written
September 2017
To the people at Echoes of India,
I do not know how to write a proper letter. I am asking my son to write this for me because he has better English, but I am telling him every word.
Before the water plant came, I used to fill water every morning. The walk is not long — maybe ten minutes — but the water smelled of something metallic, like old coins, and it left a white film on the inside of the pot. We knew this was not right. The doctors in the town told us once that it had too much something — a chemical — in it. But what could we do? There was no other water.
My eldest daughter has teeth that are spotted and a little soft. The doctor says this is from the water, from when she was small. My youngest, who is six, does not have this. I used to not know why. Now I do. It is because the plant opened the year after she was born.
“For the first time in my life, I gave water to my children and I was not afraid. I did not wonder what it was doing to them inside.”
On the day the plant opened, we all walked together from the houses. Someone had brought marigolds. An old man from the upper street — he is eighty, he has the bent spine that many old people here have — he touched the pipe and smiled. I think he was praying. I think we all were.
The water now is clear. It has no smell. My children drink it and ask for more. I do not have to watch them carefully when they drink, wondering. That worry is gone. I did not know how heavy it was until it lifted.
I wanted you to know this. I do not know who funds your organisation or how you got the money to build this plant. But I want to say that for our family, this is not a small thing. This is everything.
With respect and gratitude,
Lakshmi Devi
Translated from Telugu by her son, Suresh
A note from Echoes of India:Lakshmi's letter arrived unannounced in our mailbox. We read it as a team. It is, we think, the clearest explanation of why we do this work. We have kept it exactly as translated, without edits.
Lakshmi's youngest daughter is now twelve. She has never had a cavity. Her teeth are white and strong. She does not know that this is unusual in her village — that a generation before her, it was not.
Lakshmi knows. And that knowledge — the gap between what her children will grow up to take for granted and what she once feared every morning — is the measure of what has changed.
End of story
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