We would love to see more amazing instagram photos of your MiiR bottles out and about, so be sure to give us a shout with @miir or #MiiR. Happy instagraming!

If you have yet to meet John Keatley, you won’t want to miss the next episode of MiiR // live coming next Thursday, May 3. John has swapped photography stories with Annie Leibovitz, taken geography lessons from Sarah Palin, and learned to craft the perfect cocktail with the best bartender in the country. He’ll climb a tree, fight off a snow monster, or bury someone in kitty litter; all in the name of getting the perfect shot, and that’s just before breakfast. John is known for putting even the most camera-shy individual completely at ease in front of the lens. His quick sense of humor and down-to-earth outlook are what allow him to connect with his subjects and create dramatic images. His celebrity photography and editorial projects are balanced with his work on international awareness campaigns, which gave us the opportunity to travel with John to Liberia to document the building of the first MiiR well projects in Liberia. Join us as we chat with John about his creative process as a photographer and how he uses his talents to help create change through bringing awareness to some of the world’s most important issues. Here are the details for the show:

Who: You, John Keatley and the MiiR crew
What: A chat with John Keatley (a good dose of laughter is pretty much guaranteed)
When: Thursday, May 3rd, 10:00am PST
Where: tune in to www.MiiR.com/live. No cover charge, anyone can join!

To get you even more stoked for the show, we have some awesome stuff to give away before and during the show. Here’s how you can win:

1) Before the show // send out a tweet (or twenty) with why you are looking forward to the show, the URL (or short url) to this blog post AND the hashtag #MiiRlive. We will pick two lucky winners before the show starts on Thursday and they will each score a matte black 500ml insulated bottle!

2) During the show // We will be giving away a package that will include a t-shirt from our new apparel series inspired by a couple portraits from John Keatley’s Liberia Series, an 18 x 24 in. print inspired by the same portrait series and a MiiR bottle. Stay tuned for shots of the new apparel series and join the show on Thursday for your chance to win.

For a good laugh as well as some behind the scenes footage from John’s work with us in Liberia, check out the videos below.

For more info and photos from our recent project with Well Done Liberia that Eugene mentions, check out the recent Peace Community project blog updates. We can’t thank you all enough for your continued support and hope you will share MiiR with all your friends and family so we can help provide even more clean water to those in need!

get to know Peace Community

Located on the outskirts of Buchanan, Liberia, Peace Community consists of approximately 1,350 people. Prior to this project, most of the water used in this community was drawn from unprotected holes in the ground and unsafe streams or ponds like the ones seen in our documentary. These conditions have caused water-related diseases that have taken workers out of their jobs, kept children from attending school, and also resulted in deaths in the community. Not having water readily available has been particularly burdensome for women who have spent much of their day fetching clean water, which is time they could have been working in a job or getting an education. By providing access to safe water, it is the hope of ODW, WDO and MiiR that a key component in the cycle of poverty will be broken. To learn more about how these wells are built, check out our short video below.

hygiene & sanitation training

The need for clean drinking water was clear and pressing, but we recognize that introducing clean water to the community is only part of the battle. As part of this project, WDO has conducted hygiene and sanitation training for members of these communities using Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) methods, as programs like PHAST have been proven to reduce water borne diseases by upwards of 45%. Members of the community have been taught and will continue to train others about disease transmission, routes and methods to block them and how health is linked to water and sanitation. Our hope is that this training along with access to clean water will have a tremendous impact on the community’s development and provide great steps forward in improving the quality of life for the people of Peace Community.

A huge THANK YOU to all of our customers and supporters for helping to make this project possible and stay tuned for more updates as the other two wells are completed!

Water is an essential resource for every human being. Just think about how often you use water. We use it for filling our water bottles, cooking our meals, personal hygiene, as well as washing clothes and dishes. For those of us with easy access, we can often take it for granted and we can find it hard to believe that nearly a BILLION people don’t have access to clean drinking water, while about 2.6 BILLION don’t have access to basic sanitation & proper hygiene. Access to water looks different in every country. With the well projects we helped fund in Liberia and Laos it meant building wells, while in other places it could mean building bio-sand filters or working on other types of water filtration projects. Without these options, people are forced to rely on unsafe sources for water, which highly increases the risk for preventable, communicable diseases and forces communities in to a cycle of ill health and poverty that affects children most severely. Having seen the effects of this cycle firsthand, we at MiiR want to help give access to clean water to as many people as possible, and we invite you to join us.

So what can you do to help on World Water Day 2012? Here are a few ideas.

1) Make a donation of any amount to the One Day’s Wages Water Fund and help give access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities to those who need it most. 100% of your donation (minus credit card fees) will go to carefully vetted partnerships and grants.

2) Take 30 minutes to watch our documentary beyond the bottle and learn more about the clean water crisis and what you can do to help // MiiR.com/beyondthebottle

3) Choose your favorite MiiR combo and help give one person clean water for an entire year through our one4one initiative.

During the evening Hello Somebody and Kammok will be giving away free product through random raffle drawings that will include some stylish Hello Somebody watches and clothing, Kammok Roo’s and Python Straps, a few MiiR bottles along with a few other surprises.

Around 8 o’clock, the music will begin with Ryan Edgar from Dallas, TX who is featured on the Hello Somebody compilation album with The Rocket Summer, The Almost and other national acts. If you haven’t heard him yet, check out the video below.

Following Ryan will be Austin’s own Lamar Stockton and The Mourning Doves who is currently completing a successful kickstarter campaign to produce their first album. Lamar and his band play for numerous Austin musicians and singer songwriters, and we hear from Kammok’s Director of MOB Instigation, Ty Clark, that they are a group made up of some of Austin’s finest musicians. You can check out Lamar’s Kickstarter campaign here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1306048585/lamar-stockton-and-the-mourning-doves-debut-album

And last but not least, one of the brightest musical acts from 2011 will be headlining the show to close out the night. Seryn out of Denton, TX was named by Paste Magazine the best live act of SXSW 2011 and also made Paste’s top 50 albums of 2011 at #34, so you can rest assured that the show will close with some pretty incredible listening. Check out the video below for a little sample of Seryn and prepare yourself for what should be an even better live show.

We hope you can make it out for an amazing night with some people who are doing some incredible work to help change the world! Here is the link to the Facebook event page where you can find more details: Hello Somebody with Kammok present Seryn during SXSW 2012

this problem has left all of us at MiiR outraged to say the least. trust me when I say we’re just as frustrated as you. for us, not only can we not accept new orders from amazing customers, we look like idiots in front of all of you. our cart provider has ensured us they have all their resources working on this (and it’s no mom and pop company either).

right now we’re wishing it was as easy as 1-2-3 to switch platforms but the truth is this takes time as well. as I write this, we’re evaluating our options to get our site back up and running and accepting orders as quickly as possible. I want to say we appreciate your business and hope you will be patient with us as we scramble to excel at our business of serving you.

best regards,
bryan papé
ceo
bp@miir.com