Safe Water for Bout Savane

(The photo above is one of my favorite images of Bout Savane – afternoon bath time, right next to – of course – the community motorcycle)

As you could probably tell from my previous posts (see https://thehaitifund.org/2020/02/28/a-moment-thats-haunted-me/ and https://thehaitifund.org/2020/02/28/a-pretty-cool-follow-up-story/), the whole thing with the girl dying in Bout Savane hit me pretty hard.  I think it hit all of us on the November trip harder than anything else we experienced all week.  And what really gets to me still – what really strikes me as absolutely obscene – is to have people living within a 3-hour radius of me (by plane, granted) dying of water born illness because they have no access to safe drinking water.

So when Johnny, Jim, and I were in St. Michel and Bout Savane in January of 2015, we asked JT what would be the most cost-effective way to ensure that the people in that area at least had access to safe drinking water.  He said that the ideal scenario would be to put in a well, if it were possible to drill one in that area.  He also said he’s got a guy he trusts with that kind of thing (same guy that put a well in at Pageste, the place across the river from Mirebalais that some of us have been to), and that he’d have him check out the feasibility.

About a month later JT told me he had looked into it, and they could definitely put a well in – that he would personally guarantee was operational and pumping fresh water – for a total of $7,000.

The Haiti Fund committed to raising the necessary funding to make that thing happen – and thus began our well-drilling project in Bout Savane.