Jeronima Ramos is finished.

Jeronima Ramos is finished hauling water. She is finished drinking dirty water. She is finished using the forest as her bathroom. She is finished watching children in her community get sick from dirty water.

And she is so convinced she is finished hauling water, this frail 70-year-old woman stood in front of her entire community and threw her water pot to the ground, breaking the ceramic container to pieces and shouting “I will haul water no more!”

Jeronima has good reason to make such a dramatic gesture. Jeronima has hauled water nearly every day for the past 70 years. In recent years, she has lived alone and continued to haul water by herself from an unprotected water source 15 minutes from her house up to five times a day.

Now, with the new water system in her community, she says, “I feel happy because I am not carrying water on my head anymore. I have clean water for bathing, for drinking – for everything.”

She is also grateful that the children in her community will be drinking clean water. “I think the children’s basic health will improve and they won’t get sick anymore,” said Jeronima. “When my children were little they would get sick from the water and we would have to run to the health centers.”

Jeronima is finished hauling water, and she and her community are so happy to have started their new life with clean water and safe latrines.

This week, we’re celebrating the 200 million people who have gained access to clean water over the past 10 years. Join us by donating your Facebook and Twitter status at oneWEEKforWATER.org.

World Water Week 2010 Success Stories

Kids in Dhobari slum put on a skit about getting sick from unsafe water.

We were each handed a beautiful white-budded flower stem as we entered Dhobari slum. Residents directed us to the chairs circled in a main area between brown scrap metal shacks. We sat as a few kids welcomed us and began a skit about getting sick from dirty water and then healthy again with a new clean water point. They finished their skit and finished with a few hygiene songs in Bengali. Dozens of men, women, and children from the community also hovered around to watch and joined us in applause and appreciation.

Our second visit was to Deowanbari, a slum community with a water project in progress. Muddy water spewed up from the ground and flooded the small space as four men drilled about 300 feet down, pumping long bamboo poles and tapping into the safe water. This is the first clean water project in their community and will be finished in three or four days! In the absence of clean water, community members were walking 30 minutes to a contaminated pond for water, four to five times a day. I got to meet a 30-year-old mother named Laila who was a leader in her community and helped this project come to fruition by organizing the community to approach Water.org and DSK for a WaterCredit loan.

The afternoon was spent back at Board Guard slum (the community in need of safe water and sanitation), talking with more community members about their situation, and taking videos and photos. I talked with the president and general secretary of the Community-Based-Organization (CBO) that they had formed over a year ago to mobilize the community around access to safe water.
Alamgir Hossain, the CBO’s General Secretary said, “We formed the CBO because one person cannot do anything, but united, we have power. We demand safe water because we have suffered from the water crisis for a long time.” Alamgir and Shajeda Begum, the CBO president, shared with me some of their hopes and goals for their community in obtaining access to safe water and sanitation in the near future.

People begin to line up in the evening at a public water tap in Dhaka in hopes of getting some water when it is briefly turned on.

We left as dusk was in full motion. As we drove away, we passed the water point about a mile away from Board Guard that community members walk to twice a day for drinking water. A queue had already begun. Women and children, probably thirty deep, marked their places in line with their silver water vessels. Here, I saw the term “water insecurity” come to life for the first time. The water tap is turned on and off a couple times a day; those in line don’t know how long the water will last, or if they will even get water at all. I had read accounts from our partners about this dilemma and stories of high tensions and fights breaking out at queues because of the limited water. You can imagine the desperation, the waiting, and the uncertainty of whether or not you will get enough water or any at all…

Those in line can tell when the water is going to be shut off because of a sound the pipes make. One of our travel companions was filming the queue and just happened to have his camera at the spigot when the water was shut off. A fight broke out as the next woman in line shoved her container under the spigot in an attempt to get any amount of water she could, while the woman at the front shoved her vessel back in anger; others in line began to push and broke into a yelling frenzy. And just like that, the water was shut off for the night.

Scenes such as this one, brought on by water insecurity, are unfortunately common at public taps throughout Bangladesh and India. But when individuals and communities have the opportunity to take out a WaterCredit loan for their own safe water tap, they are able to kiss water insecurity goodbye. This is the exact reason I am able to leave these slums with any hope at all. I am inspired by the community members who are taking action on their own behalf, as well as encouraged by the solutions and successes I’m seeing with my very own eyes.

Tomorrow is our last day, and we will return to both Salepur and Board Guard slums.

- Erin Swanson, Water.org Communications Specialist

Water.org in Bangladesh

Hygiene education session with kids in Salepur slum.

February 21, 2010

Walking through the narrow, winding corridors of the slum, we arrived back at Salepur to a dozen kids sitting in a circle around a staff member from our local partner, DSK, who was conducting a hygiene education session. In the middle of the circle were brightly-colored cards illustrating activities such as hand-washing or cleaning a latrine. This kind of community engagement is the perfect example of sustainability in action.

Bithi with her family's hygenic latrine they obtained with a WaterCredit loan.

I spoke extensively with Shibani Chakraburdy, a DSK trainer for Community –Based Organizations (CBOs) and other DSK staff. She is responsible for all 16 Water.org projects in Dhaka, as well as all of DSK’s other projects.

Much to our delight, several community members took us by the hand and led us to see some of their completed water and sanitation projects. Baby goats and random chickens ran around against the textured walls and I watched women squatting on the ground in front of small stoves, cooking rice for lunch in their vibrant saris.

I met Bithi, a 12-year-old girl who told me she used to have harsh body and head pain from carrying home the water she collected each day at a pond located more than a mile away. She knew the contaminated water she collected was the source of diarrhea, jaundice, cholera, and dysentery. She often missed school from either collecting water or the sickness that ensued from drinking it. Sadly, her story is not uncommon.

But that was over a year ago! She proudly showed me her hand pump and hygienic latrine that was built by her family and nine other families who took out WaterCredit loans to construct them. To maintain the latrine, a different person cleans it each day.

Young kids in Salepur collect water from their safe water point built by Water.org and DSK.

“Today, I feel nice because water is available,” Bithi said. “There is no more disease in school. My family is better and healthier, and I can bathe whenever I want .”

I was carried through the day by the proud smiles of community members, such as Bithi. They showed off the successful projects and eagerly explained how their lives have drastically changed with clean water and a private place, free of disease, to relieve themselves.

Before I could really even take it all in, the sun was setting in the polluted haze. My day ended by the rice fields outside of Salepur, watching dozens of kids play leap frog and soccer, learning hand games, and exchanging smiles with the constant stream of new mothers with babies who would come for a photo.

Tomorrow we will visit Dhobari slum to watch a special presentation by the children, check out a water project in progress at Deowanbari slum, and lastly, return to Board Guard slum.

- Erin Swanson, Water.org Communications Specialist

Water.org in Bangladesh

Unhygenic latrines rest on the edge of the water in the distance.

February 20, 2010

My introduction to Bangladesh was an early morning, foggy-eyed encounter with its simple airport, and a short 5 a.m. van ride to our hotel. For a city of 12 million people, Dhaka (the capital) was strangely dark.

After a few hours of rest, I got to meet some sharp staff members of our local partner (DSK) and we headed out together to visit a few slum communities.

Our first stop was Board Guard slum, a community in need of safe water and sanitation. This was my first trip with Water.org, and therefore my first time to take in the water and sanitation problems, projects, and progress with my own senses.

Just past a busy street, we parked and walked up a sandy, gravely road. After several minutes, the beginning of resourcefully constructed one-room shacks began in waves of sand, held three feet above the ground by bamboo posts. Residents appeared, curious at our arrival.

A young boy collecting water from the contaminated pond in Board Guard.

Board Guard is home to 1,100 people, and 200 families. The main congregation of homes sits on top of a large sand hill, mostly surrounded by a stagnant, shallow pond. It was mid-afternoon, but women were still collecting water, washing clothes and dishes; kids were splashing and playing around. It didn’t take long to also notice all of the animals using the same water source, and see the unhygienic hanging latrines in the distance that discharged human waste into this pond. Not good at all…

The people welcomed us and reveled in seeing their picture on our digital screens. I look forward to returning and spending more time here this week, learning more about their situation and getting to know them.

Our second visit was to Salepur slum, a community in which Water.org and DSK has helped obtain two community latrines, 11 slab latrines, 6 pit latrines, and 15 deep pump water points! Here, between excited children and meeting more community members, we interviewed a few safe water beneficiaries about their lives before and after clean water and safe latrines.

A common site: brick kilns line the horizon in Dhaka.

As night came on and we headed home, we passed vast fields of brick kilns – laid out in a way reminiscent of a windmill farm – cooking bricks and blowing thick smoke into the air. Men and women began to light small, single wick candles in their shacks for some kind of light.

I learned that the reason it was so dark in Dhaka at night is that there is not much electricity to go around. In the daylight, a thick layer of soot from night fires and brick kilns dulls the city as it covers every tree, sign, and vehicle; many people also have an all-too-normal cough, conveying this economic truth.

Tomorrow: we will revisit and spend the whole day with the Salepur community to see more completed projects.

- Erin Swanson, Water.org Communications Specialist

Water.org in Bangladesh

Santo Luis Ramos Vazquez (25 year old son of Maria Vazquez)
Santo Luis recently moved out of his parent’s house into his own house. He is working to prepare his home for when he gets married. A big part of preparing his house has been working to complete the water project in his community to bring clean water directly to his home. He has also been working on a latrine.

Santo Luis was very involved in the construction of the new water system and household latrines. Guatincara’s new water system is a gravity flow water system that brings water from a mountain spring to houses in the community. The water system includes over nine miles of pipe, all laid and buried by hand by the community. Santo was very involved in this construction. He served as a coordinator of the community labor, overseeing 30 men from the community as they worked together to construct the system.

Line remains as water truck leaves IDP camp.

You may have noticed from time to time that web sites like Amazon.com will not show you the price of an item until you place it in your cart and then click the checkout button.  Often, this is because manufacturers dictate the minimum advertised pricing for their products.  When Amazon chooses to sell at a lower price, they can’t show it directly on their web site.  By only showing the price on the checkout page, it is then hidden from search engines designed for comparison shopping.  This can help avoid online price wars.  The deliberate lack of transparency is good for manufacturers but not for consumers.

When you do buy from most large online retailers, you have the option to track the progress of your purchase as it travels through the UPS or FedEx system.  What if, instead of providing that tracking information, FedEx listed information about the total number of packages they delivered that day and how many trucks they currently had on the road?  You’re probably asking yourself, what does any of this have to do with water and sanitation in Haiti?  Bear with me.

There is a strangely parallel universe in Haiti right now.  On the one hand, the UN through its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is seeking to coordinate the activities of dozens, if not hundreds, of traditional relief organizations.  OCHA has created 12 clusters based on the type of activity.  There are web sites, email distribution lists, and similar tools designed to reduce the cost of coordination between the agencies.  From what I have seen, the type of information that is being distributed is equivalent to how many packages UPS delivers in a day or how many trucks they have on the road at any given time.  It is useful and necessary for reporting overall progress, but is not designed to be of value to someone in an IDP camp wondering when the next food shipment or water truck will show up.

There is another set of activities outside the coordination of the U.N.  For example, Open Street Map is based on the concept of crowd-sourcing street maps all over the world.  Prior to the earthquake, there was no real road map for Port au Prince.  Now it is virtually finished.  Another initiative is Haiti.ushahidi.com. This site geographically tracks text messages, email and twitter to develop different types of incident reports, such as emergency or fire.  This can be very useful to traditional organizations and to Haitians with internet access.

Generally speaking, the organizations that are steeped with experience in disaster relief are starting to successfully use social media tools for activities like advocacy and fundraising (e.g. the Red Cross text messaging campaign).  However, we have not seen wide-spread adoption of these same tools on the ground.  Likewise, the organizations with deep technology skills rarely have a long history of participating in disaster relief.  This may all be a blinding glimpse of the obvious, so let me focus on the real possibilities for water and sanitation in Haiti.

In the IDP camps, relief agencies are distributing water using trucks and bladders.  Consequently, price gouging is currently not a wide-spread issue.  The delivery schedule, on the other hand, is a big problem.  Often, when the water truck runs empty and leaves, those left in line will sit down and wait for the next truck.  It could arrive within hours or not until the next day.  The same type of thing is happening in slums all over the developing world where water is only turned on for a few hours every several days.  People don’t know when it is going to be available, so they line up and wait.

It is not hard to imagine a scenario where an IDP camp or slum is assigned a unique three or four digit code and people sign up to receive text message updates for information relevant to that camp.  The text messages for that particular camp (or slum block) could include delivery schedules for food, water, medical supplies, doctor visits, etc.  I don’t want to over-simplify it, because it would also require some thought on how to identify and mitigate the risk of unintended consequences.  For example, how might queuing behavior change with advance information about delivery schedules?  Fortunately, there are tools to help identify potential failure modes and unintended consequences.

As the disaster efforts move beyond relief and into rebuilding, we can expect price gouging for safe drinking water to re-emerge in Haiti.  This is the pricing part of the parallel universe that I mentioned earlier in my Amazon example. In September of last year, in the slums of Port au Prince, we saw safe drinking water priced at over 350 times what it would cost from a New York City tap.  To put this in perspective, in the Port au Prince slums, one dollar spent on safe drinking water would keep a 150 lb person hydrated for about a day and a half. The same dollar spent on New York City tap water would keep them hydrated for about a year and a half.  The mark-up between wholesale and retail is stunning and probably not well known.  Any increase in transparency of water pricing could only benefit those in the camps and slums – the more localized the pricing information, the better.   This is not a new concept; for example, farmers in Africa use cell phones to obtain market prices for their crops.  Providing highly localized information via text messages to disaster victims seems like a logical progression of this type of technology.

When we think about the role of Water.org in addressing the water and sanitation crisis in Haiti and other developing countries, this is the kind of stuff we think about.  Of course, this is not the type of thing that Water.org or any organization just goes out and does on its own.  It requires coordination and cooperation with a number of organizations across different sectors.  I am optimistic that the parallel universes will continue to converge.  As this happens, we’ll also see continued improvements in how the water and sanitation crisis is addressed.

- Keith Stamm, Water.org Chief Operating Officer

Water.org in Haiti

February 6th Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Meeting at DINEPA.

February 6, 2010

It is Saturday and the schedule today includes attending a meeting of the organizations focusing on water, sanitation and hygiene, or “WASH”. To deal with the disaster, the UN has established a series of “cluster meetings.” There are 12 of these cluster meetings and each one focuses on a specific aspect of the disaster and has a designated lead organization. Examples include: (a) camp coordination and camp management, (b) food, (c) logistics and, (d) WASH. UNICEF has been designated as the lead for the WASH cluster.

Except for WASH, I believe all of the cluster meetings are held at the Port au Prince airport. The WASH sessions are convened at the offices of the Haitian government’s water and sanitation authority, DINEPA. It is a few miles south of the airport and one of a very small number of government offices unaffected by the earthquake.

There were fewer people at the meeting than I had expected. They have chosen to hold the WASH meetings in French, which is a departure from most, if not all, of the other clusters. I had heard rumors beforehand that this was the case. At least one-third of the attendees did not speak French (including me). That may or may not have had something to do with the sparse attendance.

Earthquake damaged building next to a supermarket.

There were occasional English translations during the course of the meeting. It was mentioned that at the IDP camps, sanitation is currently a greater concern than water and that NGOs need to have more of a presence at the site to collect waste. It was also reported that many of the pumping stations are operational, but that there are still far too many leaks in the distribution system and many of the shut-off valves are still buried behind rubble.  Compared to the other cluster meetings I attended, this was more of a briefing than an information gathering and planning session.

After the meeting, I went with the CHF security team who were doing the shopping for evening dinner at our camp. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the supermarkets were stocked. These guys knew where to go, so I don’t necessarily think my experience was a representative sample of the situation. The last place we visited was very well stocked with food but not with very many shoppers. It was right next to a multi-story building that was clearly damaged by the earthquake, but still standing. That was keeping people out of the neighboring building. Clearly, to implode a building in such a tight space presents a lot more challenges when there is existing structural damage. The neighboring businesses will continue to be negatively affected even though their supply chains have re-emerged. This is just one example of many that depicts the long-term challenges ahead.

Tomorrow morning, I am scheduled to leave for the Dominican Republic where I will catch a flight back to the United States. I will wrap up with one more posting that summarizes my observations and thoughts from this trip.

- Keith Stamm, Water.org Chief Operating Officer

Water.org in Haiti

Yesterday, we met a Haitian American at one of the IDP camps who was fluent in Creole, French, and English. We were to meet him today so that he could act as a translator when visiting other camps. Ultimately, we could not make the connection happen, so I went to the camps on my own.

The best way to plan the camp visits is to pull up Google Maps, switch to satellite view, zoom in a bit, and look for pockets of deep blue tarps and then place mark them. When they are available, CHF graciously provides a vehicle with a Haitian driver, so you show the driver the place marks and then head in that general direction.

Water bladder at IDP camp (click picture to see where it is located in Haiti).

The IDP camps are in school yards, parks, soccer stadiums, and in the city, anywhere there is open space. In the camps we visited, there were anywhere from 200 to 2,000 people. In each camp, I ran into someone who spoke at least broken English so we were able to communicate, albeit on a limited basis.

Whenever I spoke to people in the camps, the list of priorities were shelter, food, water, medical care, and sanitation. The priority order changes from camp to camp, but in every instance water was in the top two and sanitation was typically listed fourth or fifth.

When the water vendors deliver water, they sell it from the truck. When relief agencies are involved, they will often use the trucks to fill large bladders like the one shown.

The ratio of people to latrines ranged from 50:1 to 100:1. The latrines are often porta-potties which are not designed to be used for weeks on end.

You see so many people displaced that there can be a tendency after awhile to de-personalize the situation. Yesterday, while we were prepping for the days’ activities, I sat down next to a Haitian CHF employee and asked him how he fared during the earthquake. He looked at me and said he had lost his house and daughter. It was very personal.

See more photos from day four here.

- Keith Stamm, Water.org Chief Operating Officer

Water.org in Haiti

The evening temperatures have been near-perfect for camping. The only minor downside has been the serenade of nearby roosters crowing and dogs barking throughout the night. You quickly learn to sleep through it. More and more of the resident CHF staff are going back to their houses to sleep at night.

Language barriers continue to be an issue. Today, we were supposed to visit the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps. Due to a language-related misunderstanding, we ended up at the Ministry of Education. The building was destroyed by the earthquake, resulting in many fatalities. The most complete set of records of Haitian citizens resided in this complex, so early on CHF did quite a bit of work recovering information from the on-site computers.

Because we started at the Ministry of Education, we were only able to make it to one IDP camp. It is situated in the field of a soccer stadium. We were told that there were 4,600 people in the camp. Based on a quick estimation of the number of tents, that looked about right. There were rows of tents tied together for the length of the field with 18 to 24 inch alleyways between the rows.

When we arrived at the camp, there were vendors on the street above the stadium selling highly-turbid bottled water. There was also a water truck on the field and a long queue. The truck left before everyone received water, but those left in the queue just sat down and stayed there.

We asked to see the “president” of the camp and were taken to the top of the stadium steps into a small room not more than three by five feet. There were at least a half dozen people in there when we arrived. In most places when you ask to see the community leader, you are introduced to an elder in his late sixties or seventies. The “president” of this camp was no more than 30 years old and well-muscled. I don’t think there was an election to the post. He spoke Creole but little French, so communication was a challenge until a Haitian-American named MarcDany Pierre found his way into the room. He was from Miami, spoke fluent English, French and Creole and was agreeable to translating the conversation. We asked the leaders to prioritize their needs. They went off and prepared the list shown here.

Organizations that act as first-responders to disasters focus on providing immediate relief with solutions that are close to immediate as possible. However, these solutions are not necessarily economically, operationally, or environmentally sustainable. Immediate relief efforts can include the provision of bottled water, water bladders, or high-tech purification of surface water. Our focus has been on building capacity in communities and facilitating the use of locally-accepted technologies for water and sanitation that have been proven to be sustainable. The trade-off is that our solutions don’t provide relief within hours and days. Both approaches are necessary, but they are completely different and serve different, but equally important needs. So, in considering how the earthquake might impact our programs in Haiti, one possibility is to deploy in the camps that will likely become permanent settlements and ultimately communities. There are all types of considerations with that approach, but that is the subject of a longer note.

Tomorrow, I have made arrangements to meet with MarcDany at the IDP camp and travel to other sites where he can act as a translator.

- Keith Stamm, Water.org Chief Operating Officer

Water.org in Haiti