Clean water is vital to good health. There are several ways to transform marginally safe or contaminated water into drinkable water. A common practice in the remote islands of Indonesia is to boil the water. It takes time and fuel to boil every drop of water a family drinks. A well (bore) can be drilled at a per-foot cost. It can be too expensive for some villages. Another option is to hand dig a well. This is a lot of work and the well remains open to future contamination. Roof catchment systems can also provide drinkable water. The challenge with this method is that you only get water when it rains. In a region that has a wet and dry season, there can be long stretches of time between the rainy days. Using water out of streams and rivers is also common. The rivers are used by everyone who lives near the river for everything including bathing, toilets and washing clothes. The water from these rivers can be just full of disease. These are all methods used by the poor to get drinkable water.
Recently we had a wonderful portable hand pump water purification system donated. It will be very valuable for our teams to use on mobile clinics. The medical and dental teams go to remote villages to serve the needs of the poor in their villages. These teams will stay in the villages for one day or as much as three months. In many villages the challenge is having clean water to use for the medical and dental work. This portable purification system weighs only 20 pounds and will be used by the mobile clinic teams to guarantee they will have good water. It doesn’t take a lot to help in big ways.
