Water: source of life

1. Every week, 42,000 people die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
2. Students in developing countries lose 443 million school days each year due to diseases associated with the lack of water, sanitation and hygiene. Repeated episodes of diarrhea and worm infestations diminish a child's ability to learn and impair cognitive development.
3. More people have access to cell phones than to toilets. As a result, tons of untreated human waste make their way to water sources causing a litany of diseases, and even death.
4. The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.

Many Haitians do not have access to potable drinking water but that can change.  If people back home stopped or cut back on buying bottled water and used a filtered water system (some are simple and inexpensive) and donated some of the money saved to groups like those below, water could be available to thousands more Haitians.

 Water.org and charity: water

Rain

One challenge we are facing with all this rain of late is the standing water.  We are working on eliminating it but need a little help from Mother Nature.  The children's village is situated at a low point on the property and the water table here is high plus there's a high clay content right under the surface.

Water Evacuation

Brenda and John (from Maine) seen working on the standing water problem near the water pump.

Temporary measures

Since the news that our water source was polluted we went out and bought a "chatodo", a small cistern, in which we pump water that the children will drink. We treat the water with Aquatabs to guarantee that the water is potable.

Precious water

Here are two shots of the flowing, life-giving water that is irrigating a new section of the farm. The water comes from a hand-dug well and is pumped out into earth canals to guarantee a decent harvest. Without the well and pump we'd be at the mercy of the weather. With it we look forward to healthy crops. The only downside is that the pump operates on fossil fuel (gas) but someday we hope to have a solar pumping station. Photo by Theo.