Today’s post is written by Dan Brown, Chief Marketing Officer for Healing Waters International.

And for World Water Day 2009, we, Healing Waters, are celebrating our role in helping resolve this crisis by giving away free water at each of the water purification systems we’ve built with our local ministry partners. This event happens to coincide with a major ministry milestone for us – distributing 75 million gallons of safe drinking water to poor communities in developing countries.

Sustainability along with personal and community transformation are key components of our operational model. Over 110,000 people in poor, urban slums receive their daily drinking water from churches we partner with.

The churches have put nearly $500,000 back into their neighborhoods with community service funds and donated more than 3 million gallons to local schools. Every $50 donated to Healing Waters since we began seven years ago has provided life-giving water to another person.

While it took us 18 months to distribute our first million gallons of water and three years to deliver 10 million, we’re now distributing water at a rate of more than 1.6 million gallons a month.

With the addition of nine new systems this year, of which at least three will be at Compassion-assisted child development centers, we expect to deliver more than 2 million gallons per month by year end. (We currently operate 67 systems in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Mexico, 18 of which are at Compassion centers.)

“We are humbled to play a role in closing the gap on the world water crisis. We have become experts in our area of providing for the poor, urban communities of the developing world; but there is still so many more in need.” –  Ed Anderson, CEO of Healing Waters International.

Go to www.healingwatersintl.org to learn more, sign up for their newsletter and donate.

The problem of contaminated drinking water is a serious one. 3.4 million people, mostly children, die from water-related diseases each year — that’s the equivalent of thirty-eight 777s crashing every day and killing everyone on board. — UNICEF/WHO, Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000

There are many organizations in this world building clean water delivery systems in rural areas of the developing world, but the need for safe drinking water in more developed communities gets overlooked.

Communities may have water infrastructures in place, but the water that is distributed is contaminated. Purified bottle water is available in local stores, but not everyone can afford the “luxury” of clean water. Healing Waters International, one of our business partners, is changing that.

Healing Waters International builds water purification systems at local churches in the developing world, and trains the church staff to operate the systems and manage the accounting. The churches then sell the water in their communities, typically for less than a quarter of the cost of store-bought water, and then sponsor community service projects with the revenue that remains.

Healings Waters International Mission Statement

To see safe water provided in the name of Jesus in every poor community of the world, Healing Waters International empowers local ministry partners to bring physical, social and spiritual transformation to poor communities by providing sustainable, safe water solutions.

What a remarkable mission!

Kind of sounds like ours, doesn’t it?

Join the Healing Waters International cause on Facebook.

For the past two weeks we’ve published a series of poverty questions for you to consider. We appreciate everyone who submitted comments to the posts, and we extend our congratulations to Judy Tremblay and her enormous brain for answering the most poverty questions correctly and becoming the proud new owner of a brand, spankin’ new magnet.

Yep! A magnet. Can we get get a “Woot! Woot!” for Judy?

Now, without further ado, here is your answer key. (more…)

• Achieve universal primary education
• Ensure environmental stability
• Provide worldwide access to safe water
• Develop a global partnership for development

Two skinny mutts fight at the door of a church the color of mud. Children are waving off spare roosters and playing pat-a-cake with one another in the Dominican heat.

As our bus of foreigners pulls up and spills out like a car full of clowns, the children spot the cameras and jostle to pose and mug for us singing out, “una photografia!”

Soon a cacophony of arms is grabbing and hanging on me. Like my own barrelful of monkeys, reaching in my purse and pulling my hair. Soon, they’ve discovered the secret stash of suckers in my purse and a chorus of “un ballon, un ballon” surrounds me.

I visit the house of Yanelis, a girl who would be president of the drama club, if schools around here had drama clubs. On the way to her home, she skips ahead as we pass an elbowing line of moms and young men carrying buckets and jugs. The water truck has come. They haven’t had water for two weeks. At the front of the line a fight breaks out. We keep walking.

When she was younger, Yanelis would walk in the morning with her three brothers, searching for green bottles poking out of the litter-strewn ground of the batey, the old sugarcane plantation they live on.

They wouldn’t make much from the trash they found and recycled, but at least a few coins to plunk into their mom’s hand, as she scraped to feed her six kids on the six bucks her husband brought home each day. Mami would cook one big pot of rice on the stove each day and they would eat it ’till it was gone.

But Yanelis doesn’t go out to work with her brothers anymore. Now she dreams not of picking up green glass for a living, but of being a doctor. She was registered at the Compassion-assisted child development center near her home. Her mother now has hope for her daughter. She waves toward her son sitting in the corner, “My sons are already done. It’s too late for them.” We encourage them that it’s not, in fact, “too late.” But Yanelis is now the hope of her mother.

When we ask what it is she hopes for, she says, “I hope Yanelis won’t have to live the way I have lived.” Yanelis’ facetious grin assures us of this. She’s a young girl of extreme confidence who has firmly grabbed hold of the idea that she can accomplish anything with God.

Before we go, we pray for the family, for their home. The mother hopes to patch up the home of corrugated tin and scrap wood so it won’t leak so much. Backing toward the old stove to take a picture of the family, I step in a mud puddle. The mother is tidy, but that’s just how it is when you live with a leaky roof.

As we walk back to our car, we pass four women sitting on a dusty porch. They call out, asking for me to take their picture — they’re the ones who didn’t get any water again this week.

The situation on the batey is still hard as the dirt ground, but there are now a few shards of hope gleaming out of it, like the green glass bottles poking out that Yanelis hunts for no more. 

This is a true story about a young girl in one of Compassion’s child development centers in India.

Last summer, heavy rains poured into the village where 12-year-old Arpita lives. The ground, already saturated from previous rains, left nowhere else for the waters to go … so the entire village flooded. Muddy water, one foot deep, filled Arpita’s home.

When you live in extreme poverty, access to clean water is hard to come by, but filthy water seems to make its way to your door with great ease.

Arpita was sitting on her raised bed, getting dressed for the day. While she fussed with the fabric of her frock, she clinched an open safety pin between her teeth. Suddenly, the pin wiggled in her mouth, and Arpita found herself choking. The pin was far enough down that her throat’s natural reaction was to swallow.

The sharp edge of the pin scraped along the inside of her esophagus. Arpita ran to her mother and father to tell them what had happened.

The pin made its way all the way down to her stomach. Arpita’s mother was worried it could do severe damage. She had Arpita drink water. She rubbed her little girl’s tummy. But nothing could make the pain go away. She decided to take Arpita to the hospital.

Arpita’s father went to the Compassion project, asking the pastor to have the children pray. An odd request, considering Arpita’s parents weren’t Christians. But they still believed in the power of prayer.

The children prayed. Fervently. Tears streamed down their little faces as they pleaded for God to rescue their friend and classmate.

Meanwhile, Arpita’s doctor performed an x-ray of Arpita’s stomach. Their worst fears were confirmed. The pin was open … and it had lodged in the lining of her stomach.

Short of a miracle, the doctors were going to have to perform a rather risky surgery to open up Arpita’s stomach and remove the pin.

But our God is the God of miracles.

Watch the video to see how the story plays out.