Water Station- Haiti

Water Station

Jacmel, Haiti

July 2013

I was in Jacmel for the summer. Through an American NGO, we offered a summer program for kids and a medical clinic for families.  We are very busy. Lots of Haitian come to our programs.

It was an effort every day to make sure we had clean water.  We needed water to drink but we also needed water for the doctors to clean their hands. This became a challenge because our water buckets were consistently disappearing. Or someone would put their dirty hands in our clean water and contaminated it. Or someone would kick the bucket over and spill everything.  Or bugs would get into the bucket and die.  Their minute corpses would float around on the top.

We had a fifty-gallon drum that we filled with water.  We had a lid for that container so we did everything to keep it as clean as possible.  This was our drinking water. This quantity of water was good for several weeks.  But as we got closer to the bottom, we emptied out the container and just refilled it with fresher water.

We used the smaller buckets for our hygiene needs. I purchased several buckets of water every day.  It costed about 15 cents to fill a five-gallon bucket.  I would send someone to go get it and by the time he carried it through the streets, about a gallon had spilled and the rest had a thin layer of road dust. I surrender with this issue because this is the cleanest water I am going to get.

And every day, I would think about how I take water for granted when I am home.