One of the ideas that emerges from the education workshop on Making Water Everybody's Business is around the notion of storytelling and how, when artfully used, can become a tool for communicating water information to the public and each other. To many of us, water has become all together too dry and, frankly, boring, its inherent mystery and marvels obscured beneath layers of technical jargon. Storytelling holds the potential for clearly communicating at a simple local level the essence of water's worth.

The Symposium itself proves to be a wealth of stories– some success stories, some horror stories– told around a variety of themes and geographic focal points, with all the stories in some way involving people and those most basic issues of where their water comes from, how they use it and what happens to it downstream from them. The potential of the Internet as a tool for conveying good water information and for telling stories that inform and engage the public is brought up often by the conference, but with caveats that the World Wide Web is not a cure-all for water communication, and that in many parts of the world there is no access to running water, let alone availability of the Internet.

Yet, even without the formal tools of information technology like the Internet or digital video, creative ways of telling stories and involving the public can be developed using the tools at hand. Mustaphia Bukar of Nigeria, at the end of the week, suggested that in his nation the use of the radio would be a powerful way to reach the citizens and begin to tell the stories that remind us of how literally immersed we are in the world of water and its hydrologic cycles.