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Residents in Uganda have a reason to smile after installation of their new water-treatment system in 2011.
Photo courtesy of Water Missions International
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At Water Missions International headquarters in North Charleston, Molly and George Greene display before-and-after samples of river water and the chlorinator that helps make dirty water safe to drink.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Water Missions International has brought water-treatment systems to communities around the world. Beneficiaries include a woman delighted to tote clean water in Haiti (2010).
Photo courtesy of Arnica Spring / WMI
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In Honduras, families collect water at the town's new gathering point (2011).
Photo courtesy of Arnica Spring / WMI
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Dolo Town, Liberia, was hit hard by the Ebola outbreak. WMI installed a Living Water Treatment System there, and the community has had safe water every day since then (2014).
Photo courtesy of Sean Sheridan / WMI
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Staff and volunteers begin each work day at WMI with a company-wide "huddle"—a time for sharing victories, concerns and prayer.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Water Missions International - Living Water Video
It might have been enough—for most people—to make just that one trip to Honduras. Enough to spend a week of vacation roughing it in a less-developed country, bringing clean water to poor communities devastated by Hurricane Mitch. Enough to feel content about helping those strangers, but then come home to a comfortable, everyday American life.
But for George and Molly Greene, it was only the eye-opening beginning of a brand-new life. That one-week trip in 1998 “turned our lives right side up,” George Greene says.
“We saw things on that trip that we just had no comprehension of before we saw it,” he says. “People who were living in extreme poverty before the hurricane who had now been impacted by the hurricane. So it was the worst of the worst.”
Profoundly moved by what they discovered, the Charleston couple sold their family-owned environmental engineering firm in 2001 and launched Water Missions International, a nonprofit Christian engineering ministry with a goal to provide sustainable safe-water solutions to people in developing countries. Since then, WMI has provided safe-water systems for more than 2.5 million people in 50 countries. Worldwide, it runs 600 active projects a year; about 150 are new safe-water installations.
The staggering need the Greenes encountered in Honduras was the tip of an iceberg. Twenty percent of the world’s population—more than one billion people—lacks access to safe water.
“It impacts every aspect of their life,” George Greene says. “If you don’t have safe water, then you’re going to get sick. When you get sick in a developing country with a water-borne disease, there’s some probability that you’re going to die from that disease. And the younger you are, the higher that probability is.”
The statistics are sobering: More than 1,000 people die every hour from water-borne illness. A child dies every 15 seconds. In disaster situations, the crisis escalates.
A ‘grown-up science fair project’
For their disaster-relief trip to Honduras, George channeled his engineering skills into designing a portable water-treatment system—what Molly calls “the grown-up science fair project that worked.” They installed six systems in Honduras, then came home and refined their patented Living Water Treatment System.
The LWTS is described as “a mini water treatment plant and can purify 10,000 gallons of water per day”—enough to serve up to 5,000 people. Conveniently, the LWTS can be assembled at a disaster site in less than an hour.
The system uses standard water-treatment technology: Raw water—from lakes, lagoons, rivers, wells is pumped into the LWTS, where it is filtered to remove small and large particles. Chlorine is added to remove any disease-causing organisms. The safe, treated water that comes out at the end of the process is as clean as what Americans expect from their tap water.
“We should be able to drink that water wherever we go and not get sick,” Molly says. The Greenes also designed a unique packaging system for the portable LWTS units. All the parts and tools needed to assemble the project on site are delivered in three large, metal-framed “cages” that also function as part of the finished assembly.
At WMI’s North Charleston headquarters, about 40 to 60 volunteers build and test eight to 10 LWTS units a week, working in efficient, assembly-line fashion.
To house WMI’s growing operation, the Greenes converted a derelict, 1940s-era Navy warehouse near the Cooper River into a solar-powered facility with offices and production space—43,000 square feet, with room to grow. Like this solar-powered structure, the portable LWTS units can also be run using solar panels.
“We like to say we’re powered by the sun and the Son,” Molly says of the ministry and its team of paid staff and volunteers.
The couple devoted many hours to prayer before deciding to sell the environmental consulting business they had built from the ground up and turn all their energies to this mission. Each workday at WMI begins with a company-wide “huddle”—a time for sharing victories, concerns and prayer.
“The Christian component is what drives us,” she says. “Everyone here feels a real calling.”
Delivering relief around the globe
At the back of its warehouse, WMI keeps a revolving inventory of 50 LWTS units, ready to ship to its country programs or to disaster-response sites.
“There was a cholera outbreak in a Ugandan community, on the shores of Lake Victoria,” George recalls. “I think 90 people got cholera over a one-day period; two died. We had a water system in there the next day—the cure for cholera is water. You don’t take antibiotics. All you have to do is drink water. A lot of it.”
Recognizing the Ebola crisis in west Africa, WMI reached out with clean-water solutions, since safe water is critical in any disaster area, says Julie Johnson, WMI’s director of public relations and marketing. In Dolo Town, Liberia, hit hard by Ebola, WMI installed equipment to ensure safe water in that community. Across Liberia, WMI’s relief efforts provide chlorinated water for Ebola treatment units and hospitals.
Safe water keeps recovering patients hydrated, helps the community with sanitation, and aids healthcare workers in preventing the spread of the virus by disinfecting equipment and surfaces, Johnson says.
In Tanzania, groups from the South Carolina Lutheran Synod had been working for several years to upgrade quality-of-life issues for the Uwanji tribe in the country’s remote mountainous regions. After learning about WMI, they partnered with the ministry to install water systems in two villages in 2014, with two more in the works.
“We were digging trenches to provide water, but it wasn’t safe water,” says Cathy Milejczak of Columbia, who has volunteered on multiple trips to Tanzania with the synod. “It was definitely an upgrade, for sure. These people had no understanding of safe water at all.”
Milejczak flipped the switch in July to turn on the Mlondwe village’s new water system for the first time. Water flowed out to five faucet platforms in the village.
“They were so excited, jumping up and down, singing and dancing,” she says. “Their youth group shared a poem saying how we had saved their lives.”
In one African community, after WMI installed its clean-water system, the local health clinic shut down for lack of patients. “They didn’t have any sick kids!” Molly says. “The health clinic shut the doors and moved to another community. And that community came and said, ‘We want a water system, too!’”
In Honduras, where residents feared drinking the water from their nearby “river of death,” it was Molly who proved to the wary community that WMI’s treated water from that dreaded river was now safe to drink by boldly sipping from a hose pumping water from a new LWTS.
A 2009 health-impact study on a WMI project in Honduras found a decrease of more than 50 percent in clinic visits for diarrheal diseases after the community water system was introduced.
“Now they know the connection between dirty water and disease,” George says. “And what impact have we had on their health on a long-term basis? And what impact does that have on things like education and economy?”
Water, hygiene and ‘a sense of dignity’
Gene Lesesne of Mount Pleasant, who attends church with the Greenes, was WMI’s first volunteer in 2001 and still works weekly on the LWTS assembly line. The retired pilot had been on several medical missions trips through his church and was eager to lend a hand with building the LWTS units. Lesesne has also helped install WMI water systems in Honduras, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru and Indonesia.
“Everywhere we go, we see it—the health of the people has improved dramatically,” Lesesne says.
When someone requests a water system, WMI staff members work alongside local leaders to assess the community’s unique needs. Community leaders must commit to the project, as they are the ones who will operate and maintain the system. Then, when funds are secured to finance the job, WMI staff work with local leaders to design and implement a sustainable water system that can continue to serve the community from then on.
The nonprofit WMI relies on donors to finance its projects—“from little ladies in northern Minnesota who send you $10 a year to corporations that would give you a million-dollar grant,” George says—since the communities in need rarely have the funds to fix the problem.
Building and implementing a comprehensive, ongoing, safe-water system for a community can cost between $25,000 and $30,000, Johnson says.
And safe water is just one part of the picture. Lack of sanitation affects twice as many people as those who lack access to water, but the cost to provide solutions is four times more. WMI developed the Healthy Latrine as a low-cost way of providing sanitation access to individual homes lacking sewage facilities.
One Healthy Latrine costs about $500. More than 16,000 are now being used in Haiti, Honduras and Peru.
In addition to protecting against disease, Molly says, “it offers a sense of dignity.”
Hygiene education is another key component—teaching the residents of the communities they serve how to wash their hands, how to clean the buckets they use to tote water, and how contamination happens.
“Most people don’t associate the dirty water with what’s making them sick—that’s all they’ve ever had,” Molly says.
Although their environmental engineering business had always thrived, the Greenes, members of Berkeley Electric Cooperative, never before felt the satisfaction they now find in transforming communities with clean water—giving “the kids an opportunity to go to school and the parents an opportunity to work and just basically an opportunity to break that poverty cycle,” George says.
“I think as long as God intends for us to be involved in this ministry, then that’s where we need to be,” he predicts.
Molly Greene passionately voices her belief that the global water crisis is solvable. The technology exists; what’s needed are the funds and the partners to deliver sustainable safe-water solutions.
“We don’t go home saying, ‘Look what a great job we’ve been able to do,’ ” she says. “We go home thinking, ‘Oh, man, there’s such an opportunity! There’s more to do!’”
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Get More
To learn more about Water Missions International and find out how your church or organization can get involved in supporting global water projects, visit watermissions.org, Facebook or call (843) 769-7395.
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Charleston Walk for Water
On Saturday, March 21, Water Missions International will hold its ninth annual Charleston Walk for Water in observance of World Water Day. The annual walk increases awareness of the need for clean water around the world and raises funds for WMI’s safe-water projects.
Starting in Brittlebank Park, walk participants will be given an empty two-gallon bucket to carry. Halfway through the 3.5-mile walk, they will fill their buckets with dirty water, then carry the filled buckets to the end of the route. The journey simulates the trek that many people around the world make one or more times a day to fill buckets at an unsanitary water source.
Last year, more than 3,200 people participated in the Walk for Water, raising $210,000. This year’s goals are 5,000 walkers and $250,000 in donations.
To register as a walker or to make a donation online, go here. Readers of South Carolina Living magazine get a $5 discount off the $20 adult registration fee by entering the code “SCLIVING” at checkout. If you are registering multiple walkers, the discount will apply to each adult registration.
For those who cannot walk in Charleston on March 21, the website also lists opportunities to join walks in other communities, including a March 7 Columbia Walk for Water organized by WMI volunteer Cathy Milejczak. For information on how to organize a walk in your own community, go to walkinabucket.org.