WaterLog

I’ve added several new video clips to the website recently, covering recent trips Water 1st made to Bangladesh, India and Honduras. Water 1st travelled to Honduras in August, 2006, and to India and Bangladesh in September/October. The footage online now was part of the film presented at the Give Water • Give Life Benefit at Benaroya Hall in Seattle in November.

The Bangladesh film features a beautiful song by a woman from a beneficiarly community in the slums of Dhaka City, as well as some authentic Bangladeshi dancing by another community member. We are often greeted with this sort of emotional outpouring of thanks from people who have benefitted from the work of Water 1st, and it’s especially meaningful to me to be able to share those moments of creativity and thanks with people here in the United States.

I hope you’ll take a look at the India and Honduras films, too. It is so exciting to see the work taking place around the world thanks to the contributions of donors here in the U.S. In India we saw several hand–dug wells being drilled. This is a fascinating process which would be hard to put into words. Fortunately you can see it take place for yourself online now. In San Gabriel, Honduras you can meet the community as they construct their new water system, and hear first–hand of the joy and struggles of that process.
You can find the new clips here:

• India
• Bangladesh
• Honduras
• India Unplugged

I hope you enjoy the new material, and I would very much appreciate your feedback and comments.

Chris

This weekend, two articles in the Seattle Times and the Seattle PI caught my attention. Both were covering a recent $17 million Gates Foundation grant for developing new water treatment technologies for the developing world. In the past few years, the focus on new water treatment technologies has increased as knowledge of the global water crisis has gained more attention, and also as people have become more frustrated with the failures in the public sector to address this issue.

Original article in Seattle Times

I applaud the new Gates Foundation interest in this area and PATH’s track record in making technologies accessible to the poor. However, new technologies by themselves will have little impact on the goal to “ensure sustainable access to safe and affordable drinking water for the poor.”

The basic problem is convenient access to water and latrines. Women and children all over the world spend their days collecting water, and they can’t carry home enough water to meet their most basic needs for drinking, bathing, and hand-washing. Without safe sanitation, people defecate in the open, creating an extremely unhygienic and hazardous environment for the entire family and undermining human dignity.

For millions of girls from poor households, there is a straight trade-off between time spent in school and time spent collecting water. For their mothers, time spent collecting water means they have little time for more productive work or rest. To solve this problem, the journey to collect water must be eliminated and every person needs access to a proper latrine.

There is definitely a role for household level treatment, but I don’t think it should be done in the absence of an overall public health approach that includes access to water, latrines, and hygiene education. From what I’ve seen, simple chlorine is used well at the household level (no need for a new invention) when this integrated approach is used. Moreover, I don’t think individual point-of-use treatment is a cost-effective long-term solution. Although 8-cents to treat 3 gallons of water sounds cheap, it’s not. It’s 5 times more than what my family pays for water from Seattle Public Utilities delivered right to our home taps – no carrying water! To provide the World Health Organization recommended bare minimum of 5 gallons per person, a family of 5 will spend about 70-cents per day on treating water. That’s too expensive for the one billion people on Earth that live on less than $1 per day.

Marla

Welcome to our very first blog. As a growing organization, it’s important to us to maintain contact with our supporters and connect you with the people and communities that benefit from your support. In addition to our website, films and newsletters, we thought a “water log” would be another way for us to stay connected.

The global water crisis is in the news a lot these days, especially since the development of the Millennium Development Goals. Almost daily, I receive an email about different news articles, some of which we’d like to share with you and have a conversation about.

When we travel to our projects, there’s always a lot of information to share - more than we can possibly put into our newsletters or films. Now that we have high speed internet access in the countries where we work, we’d like to use that to talk with you from the field and answer your questions while we are actually visiting our partners and projects.

This is the first time I’ve blogged, so I’m new to this, but I’m excited to have this format to talk with you about our work. One of my favorite things to do is talk to small groups (like our Water 1st Thursday events) about our work and answer questions ranging from the diameter of PVC pipe used in our Honduras projects to how our partners coordinate with local government in Bangladesh. So, I hope that we can have these kinds of exchanges online, and I’ll learn more about blogging as we go.

We hope you will participate in the conversation. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Marla