Projects - Gift of Water / Deep Springs International

Gift of Water / Deep Springs International

Phil Warwick, a Purdue engineering grad, is the founder of Gift of Water. He has been an annual speaker at the CINCH Haiti Gatherings at St Mary Cathedral. Gift of Water provides a simple, economical way to provide clean drinking water in even the most remote areas. There are two five-gallon buckets with a filter between them. Bleach for both buckets was used in the early days but has now been switched to pellets. It takes about an hour for five gallons to be purified enough to meet US standards, yet the whole system is light weight enough to carry up the mountains. For more information about Gift of Water, please visit http://www.giftofwater.org.

In anticipation of implementing Gift of Water in Pendus, the December 2005 group conducted numerous home surveys to help Gift of Water assess the area in terms of health, wealth, and need. At the time we began, the cost per unit was $20 (for both buckets and the filter). The initial number of units to start a Gift of Water program is 400.Gift of Water also required two local people to be hired and trained to be technicians to monitor proper usage of the in-home units. Their salary is $1,000 per year. Therefore it costs roughly $10,000 to get up and running (400 units times $20 plus $2000 for the first year salary for the two technicians). Phil Warwick has a foundation that will match your start-up money dollar for dollar. With the leadership of Dr. Dave Schmidt and his wife Andrea, we sent our $5,000 start-up money to Gift of Water in 2006 (which the foundation matched to get us going)!

When the December 2006 group arrived in Pendus, the 800 buckets and 400 filters had just arrived but had not been fully distributed. That group (along with the December 2007 group) conducted follow-up in-home visits with families that were using Gift of Water. The remarks from the families were amazing. Comments such as "My children have not had diarrhea" or "My children have not been sick" were heard frequently! As Dr. Schmidt and the other doctors have said, good, clean drinking water will do more for the overall health of the community than almost anything else we can do for Pendus.

Since children are the biggest benefactors in using Gift of Water, there have been a couple youth groups in the Lafayette area that have helped us raise some money for the Gift of Water program in Pendus. The 2007 Vacation Bible School program at the United Methodist Church in Thorntown raised over $500 while the sixth grade class at Pine Village Elementary School raised $100. With this help, St. Mary has sent money in late 2007 for an additional 200 units to be implemented in this program and will be looking to fund further units in Pendus and the surrounding chapel areas.

In 2009, Gift of Water had to close its doors, leaving us without on ground support for our water project in the Pendus area. After much research, we contacted Deep Springs International, http://deepspringsinternational.org/, about taking over for Gift of Water. Deep Springs uses a one bucket approach as opposed to the two-bucket system of Gift of Water. DSI came to the 2009 CINCH Haiti Gathering -- Jeff Ritter came in person and Mike Ritter connected by phone from Haiti! -- at St Mary in Lafayette.

Mike Ritter then met our Dec 2009 group in Pendus to meet Madam Marcel and the two Gift of Water technicians. Things were in place to train the techs and begin expansion of the number of units in the Pendus area when the Jan 12, 2010 earthquake hit Haiti and delayed things while DSI became a major water provider in some of the worst hit areas by the earthquake.

If you would like to make a donation to aid us in our activities to bring clean, healthy water to the people of Pendus, Haiti, please visit our donations page.

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