Water is definitely something we take for granted in this country. If you need a drink, you turn on a tap, find a drinking fountain, or take a bottle of water out of the fridge. If you want to wash your car, you get out the hose, and the water is right there. Does the lawn need moisture? Turn on the sprinkler system. In the kitchen, you just turn on the faucet. Ready to take a shower? Just go to the bathroom and let it warm up to a nice soothing temperature. And the best part: whatever comes out of the tap is safe to drink.
This is not the case in Haiti. First, no water is automatically considered safe to drink, so you have to consider for what purpose are you going to use the water. Unlike in the United States, there is no infrastructure to deliver the water or sewage system to take it away. Moreover, Haiti alternates between drought and rainy seasons. And because the country is mountainous, drilling wells is easier said than done.
For example, at the Palmiste-au-Vin monastery in the mountains, there are no wells, so captured rainwater is used. Rain coming off of building roofs is funneled through a gutter system and routed into large concrete reservoirs. Nor is rainwater necessarily safe to drink in Haiti. Moreover, when there isn’t enough rain, water is hauled in 55 and 80 gallon barrels by truck up the mountain, which is located about a half hour away from the nearest large village. Water weighs 8 lbs. per gallon, so you can do the math. When I started in Haiti, the untreated water was used for everything except drinking for the US teams, but the Haitians were drinking the water, as it was all they had. At the clinic, about 15% of the patients seen had intestinal problems. After a couple of visits, I was pretty certain this was due to bad water. It would not be until 2004, when I attended a workshop sponsored by Living Waters for the World (LWW), that the solution would become available.
Over the past ten years, LWW has developed a reasonably inexpensive water purification system that produces 300 gallons per hour, and which is made of simple PVC parts. While it had some interesting technology associated with it, it was not a complex system. My excitement grew when I realized that for about $5,000.00, we could solve the bad water problem at Palmiste-au-Vin. Brother Olizard and Brother Leandre embraced the idea, and the first system was installed in 2006. Within 3 months, the results were in. No more intestinal problems with those who used the clean water. This was the beginning of the Holy Spirit Haiti Mission water purification project. Word spread quickly and now we have installed purification systems in 20 communities in Haiti, including the systems at the Notre Dame de la Charité orphanage and school. So when you go turn on a tap, flush a toilet, or wash a car, remember how blessed you are to have something 85% of the world does not have – pure water.