Today I’m thinking about water in all its forms. Of course, it’s the end of the year, and I started browsing through photos from our travels in the last 12 months to see what role water played. I found lots of them.

We skied and played in the snow in Vermont and Colorado.

Please click on photos for full-size versions

Matt and I cruised up the California coast from San Diego to Vancouver.

Tommy jumped in Lake Leman.

Both boys played in the Miroir d’Eau in Bordeaux.

All of us swam over and over again in the Mad River in Vermont.

And we hunted for crabs and clams in the waters around Chincoteague Island in Virginia.

I’ve written already this week about the travel blogging fundraiser called Passports with Purpose, which through December 11 is raising $100,000 to give to Water.org to build five wells for two communities in Haiti.

Passports with Purpose is a fundraiser with collateral benefits, and I could list for you all of the amazing prizes that you can win if you donate, but I won’t (if you like, you can see many of them at the Pinterest prize board). Or I could pull out a list of my favorite prizes, like the pearl necklace, the month-long trip to Asia, or my own prize, a three-night Kimpton Hotel stay.  But I won’t really do that either (partly because I’d be happy to win just about any of the prizes on the list – how can I even choose favorites?).

Yes, I love the prizes as much as the next person. But the real reason you should donate to Passports with Purpose is that according to the Centers for Disease Control there has been an ongoing epidemic of cholera in Haiti since 2010. It’s because half the people there (millions of people) have no access to clean water and one in five don’t have access to an indoor toilet. It’s because about 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

As these photos show, my family has enjoyed the simple gift of water in so many ways that go beyond what we need to sustain us in just in the past 12 months.

It is with due gratitude that I’d like to offer some even simpler gifts to families like mine in Haiti.

The gift of time; time that can be used to work for money or go to school because water is freely available and hours don’t need to be spent collecting it each day.

The gift to parents of knowing that the water they give their children won’t make them sick.

The gift of clean, pure water.

What gifts of water have you received lately? I hope you’ll consider them and find it in your heart to donate to Passports with Purpose.