thirst project: personal story

• Hey everyone! My name is Alina, and I am from Thirst Project, and thank you for having me! Today I want to tell you a little bit about myself, a whole lot about the water crisis, and then hopefully, if I don’t suck, get you to join us in what we are doing.

Okay, real talk– how many of you have skipped a shower because you were just too lazy? No judgement, I respect the commitment. Now, how many of you have skipped a shower because you physically could not, because you straight up had no water? Yeah, that was just a regular Tuesday for me.

Picture this: you’ve spent your whole day outside 

picking berries,

pulling potatoes,

dirt under your nails, sweating in the sun. You walk up to the sink to finally wash your hands, and nothing comes out.  Not because anything’s broken, but because the local government just decided to turn the water off that day. And it wasn’t just a quick inconvenience either. No water meant no washing up, no doing dishes, no flushing a toilet properly. Sometimes it wouldn’t come back on until the next morning, so you're just stuck– sweaty, dirty, gross– just hoping it kicked back on.

That was a normal day for me, every other summer, visiting my grandma’s village in Kazakhstan.

my family’s Russian, originally from Kazakhstan, and that village genuinely felt like stepping into the 1800s. No real infrastructure, and water outages that could last hours. 

And I remember thinking– if this is getting to me after a couple weeks a summer, what’s it like for kids who deal with this every single day, with even less than I had?

Anyway, I didn’t really do anything with that thought for years. Honestly, if you asked anyone who knew me back then, they’d tell you I was scared. Scared of practically everything. Deep down, I wanted to be someone people actually listened to, but I looked at people in leadership and felt like they were just built different– like greatness was just wired into them from birth. I just kinda figured that space wasn't for me.So it’s kinda funny that I’m the one standing up here today talking to you about water.But I think that’s actually the point– you don't have to be the person who was always destined for this. You just have to be someone who decided to stop sitting on it.

Here’s the honest version of what changed things for me. For a while, I wasn’t someone I was proud of. Not because anything crazy was wrong with me, but I was surrounding myself with the wrong people, and I never actually did any of the big things I wanted to do, because I just doubted myself– constantly. I’d think about going for something and immediately talk myself out of it before I even tried. At some point I realized that was basically my fatal flaw. 

Like, that was the only thing that was in my way of me being the person I wanted to be. Nothing external, just me. So I stopped letting it. I started saying yes to the stuff that scared me, 

cutting out the people and habits that kept me small, actually going for the things I wanted instead of talking myself out of them first.

That’s really what I want you to take from this. Not some “believe in yourself” poster quote. If there’s a version of you that you actually want to become, the only thing standing between you and that is whatever you’re telling yourself right now. 

That kid who couldn't wash her hands after a day of farm work, thinking about other kids who have it so much worse than her? She unfortunately sat on that for YEARS before doing anything about it. So, please, don’t wait either. You should start now, with us.