A little girl with a very big heart has used her creativity to raise funds for a charity that delivers clean drinking water to some of the 663 million people in the developing world whose drinking water is unclean.
Port St Mary’s Lula Brown, aged seven, wrote Seven Surprises for Tiddles, a tale about a rabbit who goes into a cave and encounters seven ‘disgusting surprises’ – such as leeches, bats and parasites – but fortunately emerges unscathed.
Her parents, Amanda and Alex, got the story published and it went on sale last Wednesday, at £10 a copy, and by Friday all 100 had been sold with requests for 21 more copies. The proceeds will go to ‘Charity: water’, a non-profit organisation that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
The story of Tiddles is the culmination of much thought by Lula, explained Amanda.
She said: ‘Lula saw some videos about dirty drinking water on You Tube, then later another about a girl in South East Asia taking dirty drinking water to school. Lula said: “That’s not right.”’
After watching the CBBC programme Deadly 60 the idea for her story emerged.
Amanda said: ‘She can’t dig a well, but she can write – so write she did!’
The instinct to write runs in the blood and her dad Alex is a published author of books for children. He is, said Amanda, quite ‘jealous’ of her runaway publishing success!
‘She would love for people to give her enough money to dig the well herself,’ said Amanda. ‘Short of that, we will raise money to help people wherever we can. She wants to set up her own charity called “gush gush”, but that could be some way down the line.’
Amanda said she is ‘a bit shocked’ at how quickly the books have sold – all the publicity has been done on Facebook – and already they are into the second print run.
Lula said: ‘This is the first book I have written. It is making me very happy. I want to help people to have clean water, I just want people to be well and healthy.’
To order a copy see www.gushgush.strikingly.com.