Less than a year ago, children as young as 6 in Iraya, a small village south of Manila in the Philippines, began their days walking more than a mile round-trip before school to fetch drinking water for their breakfast. They repeated their trek at noon and again in the evening. The cause of the inconvenient water collecting: Clean drinking water was not reasonably accessible to the inhabitants of Iraya.

Before December 2008, most of the drinking water came from open springs, open dug wells and shallow artesian wells. The water almost always tested positive for fecal coliform bacteria. Recurring diarrhea became a part of children's lives — especially every time some rain contaminated the water sources.

An integral part of the Church's Clean Water Initiative is the philosophy that those who will benefit from the new water source must be as involved as possible in its construction, management, maintenance and repairs.

But that all changed in December 2007 when Church welfare missionaries Leopoldo and Pilar Fonbuena received a letter from local health workers requesting assistance with water sanitation. By the next year Iraya had a spring-capture water collection system.

"The spring comes out of a mountainside," said Elder Fonbuena. "Our partners on the ground, A Single Drop for Safe Water, suggested to build a spring capture box out of cement to dam it up, pipe it into a storage tank and then pipe it into the village. Gravity carries the water downhill and creates water pressure, eliminating the need for pumps and making it a less expensive system overall."

Clean water now flows from tap stands conveniently located in front of residences. Not coincidentally, the number of diarrhea diagnoses among Iraya's children has plummeted since the water project came to fruition.

In Iraya, a small village in the Philippines, residents reap the blessings from a spring-capture water system that brings safe, clean water near their homes.

"Before there was one [child] getting sick here almost every day," said Lucia, a 52-year-old grandmother. "But now it has been quite some time since I have heard of someone getting [diarrhea]."

Seeking sustainability

In the context of the adage "Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime," the Church has zero interest in simply doling out clean-water systems. Rather, the larger goal of the Clean Water Initiative is to make a lasting impact on communities by helping them sufficiently progress in order to achieve self-reliance by maintaining their new clean-water system.

"We have found that it is much easier to build the system than it is to build the community," said Matt Heaps, major initiatives manager for the Church's Clean Water Program. "But if all we did was go in and build the water system and leave, we would be shortchanging the people and their potential to help themselves as well as the opportunity for the Church to make an impact."

The Church utilizes a program with aspects borrowed from the World Health Organization and UNICEF that institutionalizes the creation of a local water committee for each clean-water project. The ownership interest in the new system is turned over to the local water committee before construction commences so locals can volunteer to work on the project and begin planning for its upkeep.

"Most of the time the water committee is an organization that doesn't exist before we get there," Brother Heaps said. "We do not want to go into an area to lecture them and essentially say, 'These are all the great things we've discovered — here you go!' We want to have it be participatory, and the way you do that is to have the right questions to ask, then let the community discover the answers themselves. That way they feel ownership and will want to maintain it long-term."

To enhance the likelihood of local sustainability, projects are kept as simple as possible. Depending on circumstances, system sophistication ranges from straightforward hand-dug wells to complex reverse osmosis filtration. Also, a concerted effort is made to procure building materials locally to enhance the feasibility of maintenance and repairs.

"For the express intent of being able to have them maintain it after we leave, we want them to be able to go down to the local market and buy repair parts," Brother Heaps said. "We buy all our materials from local suppliers who also carry spare parts. We find the best possible solution for the particular area we are serving, which makes each water project customized enough to help bring that crucial element of sustainability to life."

'It's all relative'

The Clean Water Initiative began in 2002 with a single project in Laos. The program's budget grew 5,000 percent in 2003, and the next year it doubled again. By 2009, the Church had helped bring clean water to more than 4 million people in 63 nations. This year alone, the Clean Water Initiative will work on approximately 40 water projects in 25 countries.

Throughout all that growth, though, the driving force behind the Church's involvement with clean water has not changed. As with all Church Humanitarian Services projects that purpose is essentially to improve the quality of life for spiritual sons and daughters of Heavenly Father, in this case by creating access to clean water — something Brother Heaps knows can be taken for granted.

"I was in Kenya last year, and there was a woman who walked nine miles to get water every day," he said. "With the well that we put into her community, she ended up walking just one mile per day instead. With tears of joy in her eyes, she expressed to me just how grateful she was.

"After I got home I thought, 'If any of us had to walk one mile to get our water, we'd be complaining and thinking it's such a hardship.' And yet, here this woman in Kenya was so elated and grateful for precisely that. It's all relative."

jaskar@desnews.com