The Need:

When we turn the tap in our home, we never suspect that what comes out might kill us. However, in many parts of the world, there is no tap, and the only water available is deadly. In Kunya village, Kenya, hundreds die each year because of diseases caused by the only water they have.

This area of southwestern Kenya, on the shore of Lake Victoria, has received little help from outside agencies, even though residents have the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world---as high as 40%. For this community of 5,000 persons, the only water available is from the lake, and it is polluted with sewage, parasites, and industrial waste. The water brings cholera, typhoid, Bilharzia, and other diseases. For a healthy person, such polluted water would be debilitating. For one who is HIV-positive, such water is deadly.

Women and children spend hours each day to walk as far as four miles to the beaches of the lake, often needing to hack an opening in the water hyacinth that often covers large portions of the surface of the lake, to fill a five-gallon can, and then to walk the miles home. (And five gallons of water weighs 40 pounds; imagine carrying 40 pounds for four miles!)

Crocodiles and poisonous snakes lurk among the water hyacinth, so wading into the lake to fill a water can is also dangerous. And the school day in Kunya runs until nearly sundown, so young women whose chore for their families is to fetch water after school must do so in the dark. Fishermen at the beaches prey on the young women, luring them into sexual encounters that infect the girls with HIV, or even raping them.

Boiling the water could of course make it safer to drink, but the cost of fuel is far beyond the means of families in the village. Today, gathering firewood for cooking takes hours each day for women and children; gathering additional wood to burn to boil water would take even longer---and within days all the wood in the area would be gone, so that gathering wood for cooking today would mean walking until tomorrow.

Clearly, the villagers need a better solution.