ARTICLE - WAVES FOR WATER

WAVES FOR WATER: HAITI'S CURE FOR CHOLERA
(TakePart) - By Jeffrey Trunell

The quiet road out of frantic Port-au-Prince leads to no escape from Haiti’s troubles.

The refugee camps of Canaan and Jerusalem stand off Route National 1, last-ditch stops for displaced earthquake victims that seem as foreign to the residents as the biblical cities for which they're named. With little hope of returning home, the settlers will become permanent citizens of these camps, which will grow into sprawling suburban slums.

The road passes deforested mountainsides, the bare slopes playing catalyst to Haiti’s heightening floods. Posters with the faces of presidential candidates blast calls of "Nou Bouke!" (“We Are Tired”, in Creole), and decorate the road into the village of Mirebalais, the epicenter of the cholera epidemic.

This is where Waves for Water, the brainchild of Jack Rose and his pro surfer son Jon, goes to work.

Cholera in Haiti has so far claimed 2,323 lives and sickened 100,000 more. The killer came on the heels of the 2010 earthquake that rocked the hemisphere’s poorest nation. The quake's devastation is still widely apparent across Haiti's capital.

Waves for Water has set out to cure a profound epidemic with a simple solution. Its filtration system uses kidney dialysis technology to remove bacteria and viruses to make contaminated water safe for consumption. With just one filter, two plastic buckets, and the participation of anyone willing to carry the system to those in need, Waves for Water can quench more than 100 thirsty mouths each day.

The organization was born from an idea that water, according to Jack, is an "amazing gift of life, given right out of the sky.”

"We decided to do for others what has been done for us,” says Jack. “You and I grew up in a country [U.S.] where our predecessors made a decision of water for every American. Jon and I simply made the decision for all the places around the world where that decision has never been made.”

In 2009, Jon was on a surf excursion to Indonesia when a 6.9 earthquake rocked Padang, leaving 100,000 homeless and in desperate need. He hurried to the decimated resort town and distributed 10 water filters, providing clean water to hundreds.

He also received his first lesson in disaster relief.

Not long after, father and son received their second lesson in first response: When an earthquake devastated Haiti in January, 2010, the duo was tapped by J/P HRO, actor Sean Penn’s humanitarian relief organization, for aid.

"As soon as the earthquake hit,” says Jack, “we were asked to join the initial J/P HRO team.

Just a few days after the quake, I rounded up supplies, and Jon rode with our payload on an unpressurized DC-4 from a private airport in Miami to Port-au-Prince.

“Jon and I have been tag-teaming from California ever since then."

Waterborne disease is not a new problem for Haitians; diarrhea was a major cause of mortality in children, even before the earthquake. The 90 percent who survive are threatened by an array of intestinal parasites.

When Jack arrives in front of a small school at Mirebalais, he meets a collection of community organizers ready to see a demonstration of the buckets and filters.

His team unloads 3,500 gleaming white buckets into the courtyard. Dozens of boys and girls dressed proudly in uniforms gawk and giggle from their classrooms. A faded Mickey Mouse mural smiles from the wall as a second truck negotiates into the tiny space to unload.

Jack wanders inside one dark classroom. A tree grows through the floor; a large green chalkboard rests against the tree with the day’s lesson. Like the homes he builds in California that collect rainwater, Jack is pleased that nature has found its way into the design of the school.

He takes a picture with his cell phone.

Jack holds his demonstration in a cramped classroom, reviewing the details of the filter in Creole with the help of his right-hand man, Fritz. He dispatches a volunteer to bring a bucketful of dirty water. Curious eyes come alive.

The volunteer hurries down the stairs back into the courtyard and fills a bucket with shovels of dirt, gravel and water.

The foul fluid is returned to Jack. He pours it through his filter. Out comes what appears to be perfectly clean water. Jack downs a bottle to the stunned silence of his audience, and lets loose a satisfied, "Ahhhh."

A man calls out something in Creole; the assembly laughs. The man says that if the water were clean, it wouldn't have a taste, calling Jack's bluff. Jack laughs along, but the filter’s success is proven, and everyone hurries to collect their buckets.

"In the remote regions of the world where we bring our clean water systems,” Jack says, “the practice of fetching drinking water from traditional sources is akin to playing Russian roulette. When we go into an area and distribute simple bucket filters, we are effectively removing that bullet from the gun.”

The consequences of drinking unsanitary water are clear: "You get very sick and can die,” Jack explains. “It is unbearable suffering.

“My mother, a world traveler, died this way. But at least she, thanks to my dad, lived a full and adventurous life. In her honor, I get up every day and make sure that as many kids as possible have safe water to drink, so that they have the opportunity to live a long and fulfilling life, like my mom did.

"We have all been given an opportunity to solve this problem and to share the solution with each other. The act of doing this causes our best human qualities to surface. Everyone benefits, we all move forward."

In addition to Haiti, Waves for Water has set up filtration projects in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Chile.

“We aren't done yet. We won't stop until everyone who is suffering from lack of safe drinking water gets it.”