Clean Water

by Mary Lou Larkin

Feb 22, 2010

We returned from Haiti on Saturday, February 20th. A day that began at 3:30 AM in order to get a ride to the Haiti/Dominican border, take a bus to Santiago, another bus to Santo Domingo and finally a flight from Santo Domingo to NY. I arrived in Danbury at about 1 AM on Sunday.

Although I hope that myself and others will fill in the many of the stories that happened after our "blogger extraordinaire" Megan Cavanaugh, returned to the US three days prior to us, for work and school, there are a few thoughts about returning home that I would like to share before they are forgotten.

As many times as I have returned from Haiti, the one thing that never fails to hit me is our ready, easy, instant access to clean water in the US. Here water can be had anywhere we go from the many faucets in our homes, from an outside hose, from the closest convenience store, coolers at work. We get hot water or cold water whenever we need it. We can get ice water or ice to cool our water. We can let a faucet run to warm up water or to make it colder.

The first thing I wanted when I got home was a hot shower. I can't tell you how appreciative I felt and how "water conscious" I always feel my first few days home from Haiti, because in Haiti none of these conveniences exist. Worse yet is that much water just doesn't exist. Haitian people spend hours everyday looking for water, carrying water from wells, buying water if they have money. In Port au Prince, in tent cities, mothers washed their children with water from puddles after a rain.

While our team was in Haiti we always had to plan our water use, making sure that we filled our water bottles every morning from the bottled water the nuns provided for us. When we showered, (the water trickled from a shower head), we got wet, turned the water off, soaped up, then turned the water on to rinse.

The one request our wonderful eye care team VOSH asked for was that we would provide plenty of water. We couldn't quite meet the request, but had to give them soda (yes, you can buy soda easily if you have the money) when the water we brought in the morning ran out. At the end of the day, when we went to eat the first thing I wanted was a glass of water. The water we as visitors had access to was clean. We would never get sick from it, never get parasites.

During the past year something quite extraordinary has happened in Jacquesyl. A teacher named Ultide and a heath educator named Jodel took the initiative to apply for a water filtration program. Through funds provided by an outside organization they organized the building of a water house, with a filtering system inside. A large cistern is on top of the house and water is carried by pipes from a giant cistern about a mile away to this cistern and flows into the filtering system, providing clean water which will be sold very inexpensively to maintain the system. The building of this system was completed last September. However the town was required to purchase the actual filters which cost $600.00.

No one in Jacquesyl makes that much money in a year, so Haiti Marycare planned to provide it, but we had so many urgent needs we had not yet been able to do so. Thanks to the generosity of so many people we were able to provide the money during this past trip and clean water is now flowing.

Twelve years ago when I first went to Jacquesyl this would never have been possible. There were no health educators, people didn't know that the water they drank was making them sick, there was no organazational structure to apply for and follow through on a sustainable project. Today, people appreciate not only getting water, but the importance to their health and their children's health.

There is a Haitian proverb, "Little by little the bird builds it's nest". Little by little people are becoming healthier in mind and body.

Mary Lou Larkin