Frog water

I was watching the nightly news last night and one of the stories was about Iraq. In this piece, the reporter was out in a village that was fairly isolated. It did not look like the village had electricity or sanitation or running water. In fact, the point of this story seemed to be about the water well that was on one of the villager’s property. The owner of the well was sharing his water with the rest of the village and everyone seemed OK with that.

The reporter then went on about how the villagers had to ‘share’ their well with some frogs. To drive the point home, the camera-man showed the well and it had two frogs in it. The well looked to be about 6 feet deep with about a foot of water in it. If the darn frogs bothered the villagers so much, it looked like it would be fairly easy for them to fish the frogs out and get rid of them. They were just frogs. These are people that are so grateful to have ANY water at all.

So many things are so relative and it seems that the news can not help but try to show anything in the worst possible light. Instead of a story of how a remote village was sharing their limited resources and everyone was getting along and surviving, it was a story about how the poor, poor villagers had to drink ‘frog’ water. Grow up already. To put this in a little perspective, have you not ever taken a drink from a stream? Also, there people in are places in Africa (and I am sure in Iraq as well) that would give their right arm to have a supply of water, frogs included.