The sights and experiences of revisiting Liberian clean water villages.

Walking into a Liberian village for the first time in a long time kicked my senses into high gear. I could feel poverty again on a different level as I was surrounded by small grass huts that were homes for the villagers. The scenery was awesome, but the living conditions would be challenging if I were to live here. Thatched roofs, dirt floors, an outdoor kitchen consisting of a fire pit, and buckets for water were the norm. The smell of a fire pit and a large deep pan of cooked rice were reminders of what lunch would look like, their first meal of the day.

As I walked around the village someone reminded me that it is harvest season here in Liberia. Rice was being harvested which provides the main staple of food. Almost every household had someone in the front yard pounding raw rice with a large wooden rod into a carved out tree trunk. Even the children were getting in on this chore as they must prepare their own rice in order to cook it and eat it. The children let me take a turn in the pounding and I quickly learned that villagers must work hard to prepare their food.

Bananas were in season and we enjoyed a large bunch that we were able to purchase for $1. Kasava was also being harvested and nothing went to waste. Even the leaves for the Kasava plants were being pounded the same way as the rice, grinding it down into something that looked like parsley flakes. These flakes would later be boiled and served over the rice for a traditional Liberian meal. Two meals a day at most would be the norm here.

There were chickens running around everywhere and a few dogs that really didn't like me being there. They growled but kept their distance.

What always stands out to me in the villages is the children. Just in like every village, there are several kids that warm right up to a visitor, and then a bunch of kids that seem nervous at best. Some would duck for cover behind their parents as we approached the house to do a follow up on the clean water filter systems. Am I really that scary? I guess a tall, white-headed man was something they had never seen.

Follow-ups are a big part of the sustainability of the Sawyer filters and they serve as an opportunity to see if the villagers are using and cleaning their filter systems properly. We learned a long time ago that sustainability is all about "behavior change." Without the villagers taking to the newly learned behavior of filtering their water and cleaning their filters, these amazing water filters would have a short lifespan. So we give continuing education and training to each family who received a filter system so they can demonstrate proper use and maintenance of the filters, and so the filters will last for years.

We visited 8 different villages for what would be the 2nd round of follow-ups. Follow-up number 1 comes at the 2-week mark, and follow up number 2 comes at the 8-week mark. Nearly every person in these 8 villages was doing an awesome job of using and maintaining their systems. We only found 1 system that had a really clogged filter. With a little backflushing, we were able to get that filter working properly again, and it provided us a great opportunity to reinforce the behavior of cleaning the filter. Turns out, that family had damaged their cleaning plunger so we were able to replace it and teach them the idea of sharing with other families should that ever happen again.

One thing was for certain. As we surveyed each family, we were confirming that they all had experienced major changes in their health. Runny stomach used to be a normal thing in all of the villages as they were all drinking contaminated creek water, but since they've received their Sawyer filter systems, their runny stomach has been eliminated, even though the creek is still their water source. It is really quite fascinating that something so simple could change so many peoples lives!

It's a good thing for me to be in the field. It is always a reminder of how most of the world lives every day. But even with so much poverty, there is joy in the lives of these villagers. How could this be? Well, it's certainly not driven by material things, but rather a deep joy from faith, family, community, and now a new level of thriving with the gift of clean drinking water.

Clean Water Saving and Changing Lives? - Here is Proof!

The vision of providing clean drinking water to the world is something I wake up thinking about every day. Why? Well for starters, it's a fact that 3.4 million people die every year from waterborne sickness making bacterially contaminated water the #1 killer in the world. Secondly, I've personally met people from all over the world who have lost loved ones due to a lack of safe drinking water. My conversations with them live permanently in my heart.

I traveled to a Fijian village a few years ago with a Doctor who told me she recently had 2 different mothers bring their dead babies to her clinic. Both babies died from severe dehydration as a result of drinking bacteria-filled water.

On a recent trip to Liberia, a mother who lived in a rural bush village begged me to bring water filters to her village because the creek where they fetched their water from was literally killing her children.

I learned that a common set of questions in Liberia is "how many children have you birthed?" and "how many children are still living?"

Do these conversations bother you as much as they bothered me? They are real and very common in many parts of the world.

So my days are consumed with the following thoughts... How can I get more clean drinking water filter systems into the homes of people who so desperately need them? Who can I train and equip so the impact of clean water will exponentially multiply? And how can I use my love for systems to help organizations not only track the amount of clean water they give, but also track the impact that clean water has on diarrhea reduction, kids missing less school, adults missing less work, medical cost savings, and purchased water savings? When you follow my travels, this is what I'm doing.

A key nitch of my clean water journey has been "proving" all of these changes with real-life data collected on smartphones and tablets. I guess you could say I spend a lot of my time building capacity into people from different countries teaching them not only how to install and sustain water filter systems, but also to conduct surveys of each household that receives a clean water system. These "before and after" surveys are proving and quantifying how clean water is changing lives.

Here is an example. In a recent batch of 3.000 households surveyed, 2,197 of them reported cases of diarrhea. Two weeks after those families received water filter systems in their homes, that number was down to only 107 cases of diarrhea! That's a 95% reduction!

Coughs, sore throats, skin rash, vomiting, and headache all had dramatic decreases as well. There was also a big increase in households that reported "No symptoms" after the first follow up.

In addition to the stats, we can track everything we collect on a map. Here are maps of our progress in Liberia. 

Liberia Clean Water Progress - Green is Install - Yellow is1st Follow Up - Orange is 2nd Follow-Up - Red are County Assessments

Fuamah District, Bong County Liberia - Each dot represents a cluster of villages.

I think you get the idea. Data is "the deal." To date, I've had the privilege of personally training data teams in Fiji, Liberia, Mexico, Kenya, India, and Haiti, and being a part of installing filter systems in over 30 countries! I love my job! In my next post, I'll introduce you to some of my favorite clean water heroes around the world!