Cleaning water to save lives
A visionary, Presbyterian-led program is bringing safe drinking water to communities around the world
By Cary Estes
Students at Clean Water U conclude their training by raising their glasses, making a toast, and then taking a big drink. Of lake water.
“It’s nasty, filthy water,” says Joanie Lukins, a Clean Water U instructor. Filthy, that is, before the students put what they learned from five days of class work into practice and created a working water-treatment system. Their simple, relatively inexpensive system transformed the murky liquid from Lake Andrew into clean, safe drinking water.
This is the crowning achievement of Clean Water U, the training school for Living Waters for the World, a global mission project of the Synod of Living Waters. Held at St. Andrew Presbytery’s Camp Hopewell near Oxford, Miss., Clean Water U is equipping a rapidly expanding cadre of church and community volunteers with the skills to meet the world’s growing water crisis.
It is a crisis that has been experienced firsthand by Kofi Amfo-Akonnor, a Presbyterian minister from Ghana, where close to one-third of the population lacks access to clean drinking water. He has made two trips in recent years to Clean Water U to see if he can disprove the old West African proverb, “Filthy water cannot be washed.”
For most people in the United States, clean water is only a turn of the tap away. But that is not the case throughout much of the developing world. According to a 2006 United Nations Human Development report, more than 1 billion people have inadequate access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to adequate sanitation.
A placard in the dining hall reminds students of the importance of their work with this sobering statement: “Almost 33,000 people will die of preventable water-borne disease while you are at Clean Water U.”
At Clean Water U students learn many skills, but most of all, they learn how to teach others to teach these same skills. So the education process continues from one person to the next, and flows outward like ... water.
A faith response to the global water crisis: Children at a Presbyterian church in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula celebrate the clean water from a water treatment system that a Transylvania Presbytery mission team installed in 2005. Photo credit: Joanie LukinsBy using this teach-the-teachers process, more than 80 people in Ghana have been trained, and they are now in turn educating other members of their community. Ghana’s first Living Waters for the World system was installed in March 2006 at the Ramseyer Center, the primary training facility for the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, through a partnership between Amfo-Akonnor and the Advent Presbyterian Church in suburban Memphis, Tenn.
“It is important to teach each other, or otherwise you become dependent on one person,” says Amfo-Akonnor, who returned to Clean Water U in 2007 to expand his own training. “We hope in the coming years we will not need a U.S. partner, because we will have the capacity to put up and install the machines ourselves.”
That is what officials with Living Waters for the World want to hear. The Franklin, Tenn.-based organization aspires to do more than simply create clean-water systems for poor communities throughout the world.
“Our job is to teach a group of teachers from the community,” says Lukins. “They have a lot more ability to teach their own people than we do.”
Living Waters for the World is the brainchild of Wil Howie, who serves as director of the organization. A former practicing psychologist, Howie was studying at Columbia Theological Seminary in the late 1980s when he became interested in finding solutions to help ease the world’s water crisis. He began to seek out people who had backgrounds in water engineering and treatment. He even asked for advice from people in the swimming-pool industry who were knowledgeable about water-filtration principles.
This team eventually designed a simple clean-water system that could take an existing water source and decontaminate it. The group began placing the systems in areas of need in Mexico, but after six years they had installed fewer than a dozen.
“We thought to ourselves, ‘Wait a minute,’” says Howie. “‘At this rate, we’re not going to get very much clean water into the world ... So what if, instead of doing these things ourselves, we train people to do this?’ And that’s when Clean Water U was born.”
Officials say participants tap into a spiritual side of the program that goes beyond mere classroom work and can be as refreshing as clean water itself.
The Clean water system: Students at Clean Water U learn to put together a simple, relatively inexpensive system, including filters, ozonator and equipment for bottle washing and filling. Photo courtesy of Living Waters for the World.During the first training program in 2004, the classroom aspect quickly evolved into something much greater, says Living Waters for the World Administrator Steve Young. “Initially we were just trying to transfer information. But from the very first [session], we knew something special was going on, because of the way people bonded with one another across such a wide spectrum of theology, politics, culture, class,” Young says. “It was a beautiful thing to see. It’s because they all came for a common purpose. It’s a wonderful model for the whole church.”
“The transformational experience that seems to be occurring here is absolutely a spirit-guided thing. I don’t think anyone could possibly pretend to take credit for what’s happening here, because most of us are walking around with our mouths open,” adds Young, a member of Historic Franklin (Tenn.) Presbyterian Church and one of the few fulltime paid staff members (most, like Lukins, are volunteers).
Worship services each morning and evening include unison prayers written specifically for Clean Water U, such as “Gracious God, we acknowledge your power, made manifest at the creation of the world when you commanded the waters and brought order out of chaos.”
Scripture readings often have water-related themes, such as John 4:7–15, where Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for a drink and refers to God’s “living water.”
Cindi Oldenburg, a Catholic from Kansas City, Mo., attended Clean Water U last October in preparation for a mission trip to Bolivia this summer. She says she was “overwhelmed” by the sense of community she experienced during her five days at Camp Hopewell.
“All these people have that commitment that this is about more than just providing that water system,” Oldenburg says. “You’re driven by your faith ... We’re all here together for one common goal. We bring our different talents to make this happen.”
At the same training session Amfo-Akonnor smiled as he stood among a group of people who were strangers a few days earlier, but whom he now considers friends. Encountering people from different backgrounds, he said, had made him feel “very rich.”
Caring for bodies as well as spirits: Kofi Amfo-Akonnor, a Presbyterian pastor from Ghana, is using his Clean Water U training to improve lives in his country. Photo courtesy of Living Waters for the World.Clean Water U teaches how to build partnerships with those who need clean water; how to lead health-and-hygiene instruction; and how to install, operate and maintain water-treatment systems. People who work in engineering or water-specific fields teach the class on installation and operation, which can be slightly technical.
But Howie stresses that anybody is capable of participating in at least one of the classes, and then joining a team on a mission trip. Most participants in the training program are ordinary church members, without backgrounds in construction or engineering.
The training can be intensive, but program director Kendall Cox of First Presbyterian Church in Greenville, Miss., says the participants are determined to learn as much as possible during their short time at Clean Water U.
“They really want to wrap their minds around this, so they’re very diligent about it,” Cox says. “They want to leave whatever place they go to not just with running water, but they want it where those folks left behind can understand it and do it, too.”
Susan Jordan, an instructor and education task force moderator, agrees.
“The people who do the mission get on an airplane (to return home) after five days, after the system is built,” Jordan says. “If this has not been done properly and our international partners don’t understand the systems, then the hardware doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t think you can come to Clean Water U and think about water the same way ever again,” says Cox. “You think differently every time you turn on that tap. You’re mindful of it.
“God wants us to have clean water for our health, and living waters for our spirit. Some people don’t share the same faith as me, but it doesn’t matter. We’re here for the same thing. And we all leave here changed.”
Cary Estes is a freelance writer living in Birmingham, Ala. |
