Aurorans, church give gift of pure water to Haiti

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Tommy Grevlos, a digital storyteller, poses for a photo near the solar-powered water purification system his church, Faith Lutheran Church, in Aurora, raised money to provide. Grevlos, along with Pastor Rob Douglas and Douglas' daughter Katie, recently returned from Caboule, a remote village one hour north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where their congregation's system now provides safe water to roughly 3,000 people. | Submitted

Updated: February 14, 2012 4:35PM

The numbers are staggering. Almost 50 percent of the developing world’s population lacks sufficient sanitation facilities. One in six people worldwide get their water from an unsafe source. And saddest of all, every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation, according to the United Nations website.

Pastor Rob Douglas and his daughter Katie caught a first-hand glimpse of the global water crisis while on a high school mission trip two years ago. It came from a little girl in a refugee camp who kept asking for water, water, water. The pastor and his daughter have never been the same since.

“You don’t come back the same. You can’t,” says Douglas, who leads Faith Lutheran Church in Aurora. “Your heart breaks for the things that breaks God’s heart, and you’ve just got to do something.”

For the Douglas family, that meant setting the Faith Lutheran congregation on fire about the subject, finding a Christian based-organization (Water Missions International) that installs fresh water systems and raising the money to pay for the installation of at least one of those systems.

Douglas and his daughter recently returned from Caboule, Haiti, where their church’s $25,000, solar-powered water purification system — purchased from money raised through a Walk for Water fundraiser last year — will provide safe drinking water to an estimated 3,000 people.

“There’s a lot of solutions for safe water,” Douglas says. “But this one’s cool because it is sustainable. It can function (on its own) for 20 years.”

Though only an hour from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, the road north to Caboule deteriorated from pavement to gravel to dirt to a broad open plain.

“They don’t see foreigners very often in this part of Haiti, so there was a lot of curiosity, but there were also a lot of smiles and happiness,” Douglas says.

Douglas and Katie, along with digital storyteller Tommy Grevlos, met the equivalent of the village mayor and visited the local school — a large tent with benches for 50 children — and listened to a host of welcome songs.

“One of the amazing things was learning in conversations that kids aren’t missing school anymore,” says Douglas, who added that attendance improved from 50 to 90 percent with the installation of the new water system. “You get this ripple effect with something as simple as water. You get health, education, a better quality of life. It was a very profound experience.”

And while Faith Lutheran’s contribution might only be a drop in the bucket of the worldwide water problem, Douglas hopes to add another drop soon. This September, his church plans on hosting a second Walk for Water, the first of which raised $26,000 for this year’s Haiti project.

“We hope to make it an annual project. If we do it a second time, it must be annual, right?” Douglas says with a laugh. “God willing, it’s annual.”