Growing up in Mexico as a missionary kid, I saw a lot of injustice in plain sight: villages of people living in poverty, barely making enough to live and living in unsanitary conditions. Through my travels in developing countries, I have seen people living in huts with trash surrounding their houses and the type of…
I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the summer as part of my internship. Overall, it was a fantastic experience, and I loved learning more about the heart and mission of Healing Waters International. As a bonus of the trip, we went out on a pier our last day in…
Healing Waters International strives to provide long-term, sustainable water purification systems to help communities in the developing world have water that lasts a lifetime. Since sustainable water systems are our focus, we typically do not function as a disaster relief organization, but we are certainly burdened to come alongside communities who have been affected by…
“Which of these bottles of water is dirty?” asks Jose, the health & hygiene teacher in the rural community of San Pablo in Guatemala, while he holds up three different water bottles. One is visibly dirty, brown water that looks like the water from the river. The children immediately eliminate that bottle saying “of course…
The season of Easter is upon us and with that I’m reminded of God’s promise of Jesus in Isaiah 61:1-3 …that He will come to “proclaim good news to the poor,” to “release from darkness the prisoners” and to “bestow on them a crown of beauty for ashes.” Jesus did this and continues to do this. The…
What does it mean to “treat” water? On the surface it seems simple: “Treated water” is that which has been made safe to drink through some form of processing. This is presumably desirable for human health and global development. Taking a closer look however, the term is quite ambiguous: Does treating water imply putting something into it,…
The large banner hanging over the street was a familiar: “Merry Christmas.” But I was surprised, because I was in a small town in the Dominican Republic – in October! I saw a similar banner a couple weeks later in early November in Nairobi, Kenya. “Merry Christmas” is a greeting and a sentiment being shared…
Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to Haiti with a group from 1040.com (If you haven’t checked them out, you should. They’re an excellent example of how a business can contribute to ending the Global Water Crisis.) We were able to visit water projects in the densely populated neighborhoods of Port-Au-Prince as well as…
In Laguna del Cofre, Chiapas, Mexico, the children who attend the local school enjoy a luxury that is quite uncommon in the region—a “flush” toilet. These children would fill up a bucket with dirty water, dump the bucket in the toilet, and flush it. The problem was that they were also drinking the water directly from…