NO RURAL DRINKING WATER IS SAFE IN HONDURAS

In many of the homes of rural Honduras, there are no pipes, no valves, and no taps. The children who drink this water get very sick. They suffer diarrhea and dysentery, and some die...

•50,000 children die from water borne diseases every year.

•80% of illnesses detected in Honduras originate in contaminated water supplies

•78% of the rural population in Honduras depend on contaminated surface water.

The solution: Biosand Water Filters

How it Works:

Contaminated water is poured into the top of the filter, and virtually all of the bad organisms or pathogens are removed in the top two inches of the filter. The layers of sand remove suspended solids and most micro-organisms.

The Result: Clean, fresh water flows out of the filter using only gravity.

The Benefits: Childhood diseases due to contaminated drinking water are ended.

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Permission requested to use information from www.thewe.cc

By Bruce Finley, Denver Post International Affairs Writer

CANDELARIA, Honduras — Struggling for the water her family needs to live, Maria Garcia, seen here, hikes five times a day from her dirt-floor shack to a creek.

The creek, cloudy from pesticides and from villagers bathing and washing clothes, isn’t safe.

Her first son, Roni, died of hepatitis at age 3 — one of an estimated 2 million children a year worldwide who die from diseases linked to bad water.

Now her second son, 1-year-old Jose, “is always with diarrhea, always coughing.” Still, Garcia, 23 years old and seven months’ pregnant, has no choice. This is the only water she can get.

She scoops the creek water into her red jug. She hoists this 40-pound load onto her back and, stretching rattan cords across her forehead to support it, claws her way up a slippery clay slope on the quarter-mile haul home.

“It’s hard to do without falling,” she says. “I’m going to have to do more trips. I’m going to need the water.”

Today, nobody is moving to help Garcia and the growing numbers of people — an estimated 1.1 billion, nearly a fifth of humanity — who lack safe water. Twice that many lack basic sanitation.

The death toll from bad water mounts. United Nations officials say it tops 6,000 children a day — mostly in low-income Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases that can lead to fatal dehydration. Most common is diarrhea — easily preventable in developed nations such as the United States.

In Honduras, population 6.6 million, one of the poorest countries in the world, water problems are chronically as severe as anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The struggle for clean water is constant in villages such as Candelaria in the central highlands.

Here, amid screeching roosters and the hum of insects, Maria Garcia enters her shack and unloads her sloshing jugs beneath rafters where she stores maize, in the tradition of Lenca Indians, descendants of the Mayans who once thrived across Central America. A small fire smokes in the corner.

The only way to make the water safe — Garcia has heard from visiting Cuban health workers — is to boil it.

But boiling water requires wood. The nearest forest lies 3 miles away in the mountains — meaning a major chore for Reyes Gomez, 24, her husband.

“We can’t get that much wood,” Garcia says. At the same time, she believes that Roni died, and Jose is sick, because “we drink the water without boiling it.”

The family tried to get help for Roni. Gomez carried the boy 13 miles down the muddy road to La Esperanza — the nearest city. Doctors took blood and urine samples and sent Gomez and his son to a regional hospital 60 miles across mountains in Comayagua.

There, nurses sent them back to La Esperanza. Gomez turned to a private specialist who suggested a test for $147. Gomez sold the family’s bull for $264 to pay for the test. The specialist concluded Roni’s hepatitis was chronic. There was nothing to do. Gomez carried his son home. Six nights later, on Dec. 28, as parents and grandparents cradled him, Roni died.

“It’s very hard to lose a son,” Gomez said. “You want to kill yourself.”

Doctors face similar cases every day.

More people worldwide enter hospitals with waterborne diseases than with any other type of ailment, said Mark Brown, chief of the United Nations Development Program. Lack of safe water ranks among the leading causes of death. An estimated 2 million children a year are victims of water-related diarrhea, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said. Typically, the diarrhea comes from swallowing fecal bacteria.

In a dimly lit emergency ward along the northern coast of Honduras, Dr. Marta Benitez said 40 percent of her patients are children sick from foul water. It’s a bigger killer than the mosquito-borne malaria and hemorrhagic dengue fever that also haunt Central America.

During a recent night shift, Benitez and two nurses handled five critical cases. One dehydrated boy, Daniel Ramos, 3, lay on a gurney, eyes rolling as he drifted in and out of consciousness, loops of white tape holding an intravenous tube on his tiny right wrist.

“He’s always sick with diarrhea,” said his mother, Esperanza Hernandez, 27. He’d been crying that his stomach hurt, and in the middle of the night his family hustled down a rocky trail from their village in foggy forests above banana plantations. “I was worried he would pass out on the way to the hospital,” Hernandez said.

The family drinks stream water. “We don’t boil the water,” said Dolores Ramos, the boy’s grandmother, “because we don’t like the taste of boiled water.”

Benitez told the parents to just wait. “With IV, I think he’ll respond.” As they hung their heads, she added: “We could prevent these.”

Polluted water hurts people in countless ways. Typhoid and cholera flare regularly. Waterborne parasites cause onchocerciasis — “river blindness.” Other parasites contribute to malnutrition.

And everywhere, girls give their lives to the chore of hauling water for their families.

Miriam Garcia, 13, and her friends recently balanced 20-pound water buckets on their heads along the Guaymitas River on the outskirts of El Progresso, an industrial boomtown in northern Honduras. They had to quit school after third grade.

“My mother doesn’t come to get water because her hip hurts, so I am the only one who comes,” Garcia said.

The girls bathe, wash clothes and play in the river — within a mile of family shanties. Diarrhea and headaches are the norm.

Doctors at public clinics “only pay attention to those who have money,” Garcia said. “We all have parasites in our stomachs.”