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At 79, she boarded a plane to Africa. At 82, she's still giving.
There is a moment Diana remembers clearly. She is standing in a village in the hills of Uganda, watching people she has never met and whose language she does not speak — and they are dancing.
Not politely. Not performatively. Dancing the way people dance when something that was missing has been found.
Clean water had arrived.
"They were just dancing with joy," she recalls, her voice still carrying the weight of it. "Because now they had clean water. They didn't have to use the contaminated stuff anymore."
For Diana, an 82-year-old, originally from Australia, who now calls Prince George, British Columbia home, that moment in Uganda was the confirmation of something she had already believed but had never quite seen with her own eyes.
The story of how Diana found Acts for Water begins, fittingly enough, with water — and with a daughter who noticed it. Moving houses on a hot day in Australia, she felt the relief of clean drinking water. When her birthday came, she made a simple request: give to a water charity this year, not the other causes Diana had been supporting on her behalf.
It was a small, practical request. But it planted something. Around that same time, Diana caught a segment on the morning news — someone from Acts for Water was talking about the work, about the staggering reality that several communities in rural Uganda wake up without access to clean, safe water. She had grown up in a big city. She had lived her whole life in places where water came out of a tap, cold and clear, without a second thought.
"I had always taken it for granted," she says simply. "Fresh, clean water. I never had to think about it."
That realization, and the faith foundation underlying Acts for Water’s mission, were all she needed. She has been supporting Acts for Water ever since. A gift in her daughter's honour to reach people on the other side of the world has become an annual recurrence. Diana is also a Source Supporter — giving monthly to Acts for Water to ensure the water keeps flowing for those who need it most.
When the opportunity to participate in a Vision Trip to Uganda for Acts for Water supporters was presented, Diana didn't hesitate for long. She was 79. Africa had been on her bucket list for three decades.
"I thought, I'm going," she says. "It was something I had always wanted to do."
She made her arrangements with Lisa, a staff member who kept in steady contact with her throughout the planning process, and joined a group of six contributors for what would become a ten-day journey that she describes as one of the most meaningful experiences of her life.
The trip was well-organized. The local team, Richard, Athens, Rachel, Ambrose, and their driver William, who had come from Tanzania, were warm, knowledgeable, and endlessly patient with questions. The group visited villages at different stages of project development: some where community members were still flattening the ground for large storage tanks, others where the gravity-fed water systems were already flowing.
It was the engineering, in particular, that caught her attention.
"I understood the actual physics of it," she says. "The gravity-fed springs, running pipes over long distances. I hadn't understood that from the newsletters. Being there made it real."
But it was the people that made it unforgettable.
The villages Acts for Water works in are not passive recipients of outside help. The systems are designed to be community-owned and community-maintained. The work goes beyond pipes and springs — it includes soap-making programs, hygiene education, and the elimination of open defecation practices that quietly devastate health outcomes for entire communities.
Diana saw all of it. And she saw what it produces.
"The joy on their faces," she says. "That's what I carry with me. They were dancing. Because they had clean water and they didn't have to worry about waterborne diseases anymore."
For someone who had given for years based on faith in the organization and the logic of the need, seeing the actual impact — faces, movement, laughter, relief — reordered something.
"You read the newsletters and you think you understand," she says. "But you don't. Not until you're standing there."
Diana is not a person who gives carelessly. When she talks about why she has stayed with Acts giving monthly for nearly seven years, the word she returns to is trust.
"What you see is what they really are," she says. "I knew that going in, but the trip confirmed it. The staff, the planning, the way they work with the communities. It's real."
The education and capability of the Ugandan staff left a particular impression — the engineering knowledge, the long-term planning, the depth of understanding about how systems work and how communities can sustain them independently. These were not outsiders delivering a solution and leaving. These were partners.
She also recalls her driver William — from Tanzania, proud of his family, passionate about the value of education — with the kind of warmth reserved for people who show you something true about themselves in a short amount of time.
"He talked about his family," she says. "About education. You remember those conversations."
If you asked her what she would say to someone on the fence about giving, she would not give you a complicated answer.
"Don't take the water in your home for granted," she says. "Not everyone has it. And Acts is an organization you can trust. I've seen it myself."
She went to Africa at 79 to check something off a bucket list. What she brought back was harder to name — a memory of people dancing in a village, a clearer picture of what a pipe in the ground actually means, a story she, at 82, is still glad to tell.
The dancing, she says, stays with you.
Acts for Water is a Canadian non-profit organization providing sustainable access to clean water in rural Uganda. To learn more or make a gift, visit acts.ca
