Counting Your Faucets ...

A while ago, my wife, Leah, and I were at an event where someone was presenting a water well project.  He then said that he decided to walk through his house and count how many places he could get water, just on his property.  It is an illustration that has stuck in my mind.  I counted in our house the other day.  6.  Not counting the multiple faucets in each bathroom. 6 places where we can easily access water, whatever time of the year, whatever time of day.

But we’ve also seen the opposite end of the spectrum. Leah and I just returned from a trip to visit my family in Haiti. In many places in Haiti, the water situation is horrific.  Your day has to be planned around the availability of water and how to get it.  If you think about it, so many of the normal, everyday things you do depend on water.  Drinking, cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, taking a shower, washing your 9-month-old when she gets food or dirt all over herself.  Now think about how much longer all those things would take if you had to walk up and down steep hills to get water.

In Haiti, young and old have to walk long distances under the hot sun for water; some carry large containers of water on their head, others with their hands, others transport several containers on a wheelbarrow.  Leah was pretty impressed when she saw a girl balancing a 5-gallon container of water on her head and texting at the same time. And even after all this effort to bring the water home, the water is often unclean and sometimes downright dangerous, but it is their only option.

In looking for ways to solve this issue for at least one community, I had the opportunity to dialogue with some leaders in Merger, which is close to Gressier. They all feel that the water situation is critical. Some leaders in the community advised me that it would be better if we drill a well in the area.  This original idea has some difficulties due to the location of the village but I will let the technician determine that. The second idea they shared with me is that there is other water source nearby that seems better than the current water well. The idea is that we capture this water and use water pumps to pump the water up the hill to the cistern for the population to use. Both ideas seem a bit complicated but not impossible.

In North American, it is easy for us to take the availability of water for granted. Please pray that we would find a way to help the Merger community have access to clean water. For more information about this project and our short-term missions trip to Haiti during Easter 2018, visit our website.

Bondye beniw (God bless you),

Samuel Bernard

Local cistern

Clear but not clean

Morning water run

Young and old transporting water

My nephew carrying water to the family home