filter program | Clean Water for Haiti

15 Years of Clean Water

Sep 5, 2019

“How long does a filter last?”

It’s a question we get often as we share about what we do here at Clean Water for Haiti, and it’s a good one to be asking. People want to know if their investment in helping get Haitian families clean water is going to be a long-term thing.

For Chris and I, and our long-term staff, we know that filters can last a long time, because we’ve all had first-hand experience with them in that regard. Before CWH moved to it’s new facilities, the filter in the round house (it was literally a round house) had been working for 14 years, and we only had to clean it a couple of times, because our water source there was clear and the filter didn’t clog up at all. All of our staff are gifted a filter after 1 month of employment, so all CWH employees have had experience with their own filters working for many years. Some of our guys have been with us for over a decade, and their filters are still serving their families well.

But, what about filters that we install in the homes of others, for people who don’t have the same background and experience with the filters that all of us at CWH do? Do those filters last as long, and serve as well?

Last fall a missionary couple that we’ve known for about as long as Chris has lived in Haiti (early 2003) called to ask if we could send one of our filter technicians to check on their filter because it had stopped flowing properly, and none of the user maintenance that we teach our filter owners was working.

Kendy arrived and found one of our “gran moun” filters – one of the “old men” of CWH filters that have been installed. Mike and Marion said that they believed we installed this old man back in 2003, before CWH went through some revision projects to help decrease the size of the filter to make it lighter and use less materials, while maintaining it’s filtration capacity.

This version of the bio-sand filter was the same version that Dr. David Manz designed when he did the first designs for household use. Dr. Manz didn’t ever patent the designs, because he wanted them to be “open source” and free to the world. His goal was to make household water filtration available to anyone who needed it, whether they lived off the grid, or in a developing country with few resources for treating water. Last year Dr. Manz was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence for his work with biosand water filters.

The filter that Mike and Marion had, and that CWH used for the first few years of operation, was a beast. The concrete box itself weighed 330 lbs. That’s before any of the sand and gravel needed for installation was added. Another 90 lbs of sand and gravel goes inside the filter to make it function properly. We recently reinstalled one of our very first filters to use in the guest house, which was the same version that Mike and Marion had, and it took four of our guys to move it into the guest house to install. Can you imagine what our staff had to go through way back in the day when they were installing these things? Or the wear and tear on our delivery trucks?

Kendy, as he was attempting to do the repairs on the filter, commented that it was like working with a stranger. Everything was so different from what we do now in our filter program.

The filter box was bigger and heavier. The sand inside was coarser from what we use now. Instead of a diffuser basin there was a lip on the inside of the filter and a plastic plate (diffuser plate) was used. The lids, while nice varnished wood, were very basic compared to the carved lids we used now that are made by local craftsmen.

Kendy’s tools in his installation kit didn’t match the tube on the filter, so it was difficult to do some of the routine work that our technicians do. In Kendy’s opinion, we’ve made a lot of changes for the better over the years.

After working to do the normal cleaning, the filter wouldn’t run properly. Kendy took all the sand out and washed it, then reinstalled it – twice.

The filter still wouldn’t work, and after exhausting all options he and Evens, our foreman, decided to have Daniel drive a new filter over to Mike and Marion’s to replace the old man filter that had gone into retirement.

While Kendy was working Marion told us how much they had loved using their filter over the years, and told stories of the thousands of gallons of water that it had treated for them in that time. Imagine – 16 years of filtering water!

After Daniel arrived with the new filter, he and Kendy did quick work of installing it for Mike and Marion so they could once again have a working filter in their home. While they were sad to say good-bye to their old friend, Marion really liked the blue filter that Daniel had chosen for her.

So, is this story of a 16 year old filter a common thing for CWH, or a rarity?

Well, the truth is, we don’t know. We DO know that the filters owned by our staff and that are used at the mission compound have served us for over a decade (with the exception of the newest ones installed after we moved), with all the normal maintenance we teach our filter owners.

Part of our service plan to our beneficiaries is to visit their filter one month, three months, and one year after installation. During those visits we make sure the filter is working properly, and we reinforce the maintenance and user education. Because of those visits, and the data that we gather during each one, we know that over 95% of our filters are still being used after the first year. But, we didn’t know what happened beyond that, so we decided to find out. Two years ago we started doing 5 year follow up visits, and tracking that data as well. It turns out that this year, when those visits on filters installed in 2014 were done, over 80% of them were still being used!

Is it worth investing in Clean Water for Haiti, with the hope that you’ll be helping to provide clean water for a family for many years to come?

We think so.

~Leslie

Just Keep Juggling

Aug 30, 2018

It’s been a long time since we’ve posted anything here on the blog. So sorry about that! I feel like what we do is always a fine balance of juggling a lot of different balls all at once. It all revolves around getting filters out to families and households, but there’s a lot that goes into that, and the work doesn’t always look like we think it might.

For example, writing blog posts. It’s not just about updating everyone on what’s going on here, it’s about telling stories. It’s about bringing you into things here and allowing you to be part of it from where you sit reading this. You might not be able to travel to Haiti (though we would love it if you did) but you can be here in other ways seeing how important the work we’re doing is. When we get a chance to share here, or through social media, we’re expanding our reach and allowing others to join us on this journey.

In the every day stuff, some of those “balls” that we keep in the air are things like making sure all our vehicles are working well and reliably. It’s making sure the finances are all up to date so we know where we stand with things. It’s having the right staff in place, and having them trained well to do their jobs. It’s working with our Board of Directors, volunteers and people who are doing various jobs to make this whole thing work. It’s communicating with donors and supporters. It’s building relationships within our community. It’s trying to work in a way that is truly helping Haiti rather than doing more long term damage.

In any given day you’ll see all of the following happening…

Trucks getting repaired and out for installs…
Washing sand and gravel for installs…
Doing facility maintenance…
Finishing some projects on the guest house…
Unmolding filters, prepping molds for the next pour later in the day, and painting.

Along with everything that goes on out in the work yard, there’s everything that happens in the office, doing errands, hosting guests… it can be a long list some weeks.

So how do we get to the point where things run like a well oiled machine, even with so many “balls” in the air?

The short answer is that we build up an amazing team of people.

The team that we have here at Clean Water for Haiti is truly amazing. There is no other word for it. But, that hasn’t come without a lot of hard work from all sides.

When you work cross-culturally it can take a very long time to get to a point beyond just being friendly with people. There can be huge miscommunications. There can be a lot of frustration. There can be a lot of everything, and sometimes it feels overwhelming.

We have gone through times in the mission’s history, where things were really hard with our staff. We’ve all had to learn a lot, and a big part of that has come with being vulnerable and working to trust each other. Our staff have seen countless numbers of foreigners come into the country, do what they want, and then leave. We’ve had to not only show that we’re here for the long term, but also that we truly value the people that our staff are, and that their ideas and input are not only needed, but wanted. When you live and work in a country with a past drenched in slavery and colonialism, these are really difficult things to overcome.

In the past 5-6 years we have seen a huge shift in our staff. We’ve set a high bar for them to reach, and they have not only done that, but shot past it in so many ways. Part of that has been us telling them over and over that we know they could do it. Part of it has been setting an example by maintaining those standards. If you say, “This is the bar,” but don’t consistently hold people to that, you won’t ever reach the bar. Over time, we’ve developed a standard of what it means to be a CWH employee, and now, it’s our staff that hold each other to that standard.

A perfect example of this is Evens, our Foreman. He’s been with us since 2005, when he was still going to school for part of each work day so he could finish his secondary education. Over the years we’ve seen him grow into a man of character that we very much respect. Recently, while doing an interview with a potential employee, Chris had to step out for a minute so Evens continued on with the interview. The very first words out of his mouth were, “At Clean Water for Haiti we’re a family…” He then went on to explain that in our family we don’t accept theft, lying, etc. I smiled to myself as I worked at my desk because I loved that our staff tell other people this about working here. We’ve worked so hard to get here!

At other times I’ve seen our staff get frustrated with something that an employee does that results in them getting fired, because in their minds it’s foolish. We have had employees go through disciplinary action from us as Directors for something that maybe didn’t warrant needing to be fired, but a bit of time to think about things and choose a better path. The other staff have their own discipline that happens in those moments too, because as they’ve told me – CWH is like a chain, and when one member of the chain does something they shouldn’t, it breaks the chain and they need to earn their way back in.

Our staff really set the tone for how things are here at CWH. When we have visitors, especially those that speak Creole and understand a bit about Haiti, who go out with our team for some reason, it brings us so much joy and satisfaction when they tell us what an amazing job our team do out in the field. To hear that the communities they go into respect them and very much value the work they do, as well as the organization as a whole. Our team have built up a reputation that reaches farther than we know.

Yes, running all of this sometimes feels overwhelming, but when things are running well, it’s the best kind of overwhelming, and right now, it’s the best kind of overwhelming.

In the past few months our team has done an incredible amount of work, and Chris and I sit here just feeling blown away by all of it. When we started developing plans for the new facilities, we knew we wanted to double our capacity, which meant building things so we can build and install 400 filters per month. We’ve been pushing toward that goal for several years, but still thought it was out of reach. This summer our staff have proved that it wasn’t as far off as we thought.

In the month of July our team installed 441 filters. As of the end of the work day yesterday (Wednesday) our team has installed 391 filters. They’re out on a delivery today, and another one is scheduled for tomorrow. If all of those filters get installed we’ll end up doing over 450 filters this month. What has been the most surprising is that we’ve done this with a broken down truck that needs a motor rebuild, and another truck that was down for several days for repairs, too. We’ve also managed to keep up with all of the follow up and repairs that have needed to be done.

We’re ecstatic to see this happening, and we know that our part in this is to just keep all the balls in the air and keep this well oiled machine running.

~Leslie

What’s In A Phage?

Aug 11, 2016

Our family was away on vacation for a while, but we’re back and everyone is back to work at the mission. I feel like August is the start of a new year for us because of our summer vacation, and I always come back feeling refreshed and ready to go again. Being away also gives me time to think about the different aspects of what we do at Clean Water for Haiti, and I find myself marvelling at all of them and feeling privileged to be part of something so important.

As an organization we find ourselves in a unique position that many other orgs don’t in that we have our roots in our faith and do what we do with purpose and that helps define us, but we work in the development/humanitarian sector and what we do is technical and has a lot of science behind it. Because of those things we essentially have a foot in both the missions community, and the development/humanitarian community. Having a foot in each world means that we get to meet all kinds of interesting people. People that genuinely want to help Haiti, and who come at it from all different approaches.

Over the years we’ve had the great privilege of supporting and helping research teams that want to look at Haiti’s water situation and see how they can fight different kinds of water-borne disease. Some of that research has centered around technologies, like the bio-sand water filters that we build and distribute, and how those technologies can be improved or implemented more effectively. Sometimes the research is about the program and education side of things where people look at the data and figure out what kinds of education and end user programs need to be developed to improve sanitation and hygiene education. And then there are the really technical research projects that look at things like the microbes that are causing sickness, different strains, and what can be done to eliminate them.

Today we got to meet Ben and Clare. Ben is actually Dr. Ben, and Dr. Ben works in the science world in the realm of bacterias and vaccine development. A few months ago Dr. Ben got in touch with us to see if we would help him with a research project. We had been recommended to him by past researchers who thought we could help him out. Clare is an ecologist and is helping Ben with his research.

Ben is looking at phages – strains of bacteria. Specifically he’s here to get samples from water sources filled with Cholera, which is, sadly, most of the water sources we find in Haiti.

The work that Ben is doing with this project is ridiculously important. His goal is to take water samples from Cholera filled sources, take them back to the US, isolate the Cholera bacteria, grow it in a petri dish, then start working on a vaccine bacteria that can kill it. Cholera is one of those bacteria that actually has two strains – one that can sit in your system and never cause you to have symptoms, and another that can make you so sick you can die. The goal is to eliminate the disease causing strain.

If I understood everything Ben was telling us correctly this morning, his ultimate goal is to develop a bacterial vaccine that could actually be released into water sources that could attack the disease causing strain, and in turn, eliminate it.

Let’s think about that for a second.

It’s huge.

You know what’s so impressive about this? Ben isn’t here on a research grant or any government funding. He’s funding his whole trip and the research out of pocket because he believes it’s that important.

When I say that we get to meet fascinating, passionate people doing what we do, this is what I’m talking about. People like Ben who want to make a difference so big it could change a nation, and even the world.

Eradicating disease is big work. As an organization we want to do what we can do to support big work like this. I love that we can use our people and their skills to do that. Today Ben gets to drive all over the Artibonite Valley of Haiti with Evens, one of our longest-standing filter technicians, who will direct him to communities and water sources where we know they’re battling Cholera. We know because we’ve gone into these same communities with bio-sand filters. We’ve had a chance to visit homes, to talk to people and hear their stories. Stories that tell of lives of friends and family lost because of contaminated water.

When you choose to support the work of Clean Water for Haiti I want you to know how far reaching that is. You may think that you’re just helping to pay for a water filter, but what you’re actually doing is helping us to train people. We train people to build, deliver, install and support our filters. They work directly with families to support and educate them about water-borne disease and good sanitation and hygiene practices in their home that will stop the spread of water-borne disease. That training and work that we provide our staff with, trickles over and helps them to become not just community health workers, but a valuable resource. Every time our staff go out on deliveries, follow-up visits, and to repair filters they’re building relationships within the communities we serve. In turn, those relationships can go a long way to help people like Ben who want to make a difference at a different level.

Would you consider making a donation to Clean Water for Haiti right now? You know what we would love even more than a one time gift? A smaller gift that you give each month. $10, $25, or $40 each month might not seem like a lot to you, but over time it will not only far exceed a one time donation and help us to do more of what we do so well. We love one time donations too! Whatever you can give right now will go a long way to helping families get clean water, whether it’s through a bio-sand filter, or whether it’s helping research like what Ben is doing.

To donate right now (or anytime!) visit our DONATE page (click the link) and make a donation through our secure giving options. You can even give a gift in honor or in memory of someone.

Every bit helps, whether it’s a donation, a filter that gets installed, a conversation our staff have with a family, or developing a phage.

~Leslie

What the Numbers Mean

May 12, 2016

In my last post I answered a question sent to us by one of our Facebook followers. Today’s post is a continuation of that conversation, and it’s honestly one of the things that excites us the most about what we do. We’ve been here in Haiti for 15 years, serving families by giving them access to clean water. As you know, we choose to do that in a very focused way through building and installing water filters. But, we also have a part of our programs that involves a training school where we train other organizations to do what we do, with the hope that they’ll be able to reach parts of the country that we just physically can’t. I’ll share more about that later on on, but for now let’s jump in with todays question – what do the numbers mean?

To start things off, we need to go back to the actual numbers themselves. In my last post I finished things off by sharing that since we opened our doors here in Haiti, Clean Water for Haiti has installed over 24,000 Bio-sand filters.

We don’t have exact numbers from our early days, probably the first 4-5 years. Because we started with a small business model, more of the focus was on training. There were filters that were installed in communities, but they were typically installed in common areas, and in batches of 2-3. The idea was to create public access to filtered water, which you would think would be a good thing, but over time we learned that this model didn’t work.

In almost every case of those community installations, when the filters were visited later on, sometimes a year down the road, and sometimes only a month or two, they were found abandoned and not being used. Sometimes they were knocked over, sometimes they had the sand pulled out… lots of things. The bottom line was that they weren’t being used for the purpose intended. As an organization we’re always trying to learn from our experiences, and use that knowledge to shape and grow what we’re doing, hopefully for the better.

Eventually Chris realized that the model wasn’t working. When you want to do development effectively you have to take into consideration all of the things that will affect how effective you are. In theory we would think that any community level focus would be welcomed, and it’s not that it wasn’t – it was that people weren’t ready for that type of community focus.

Haiti has some interesting and challenging cultural issues that hadn’t been considered initially, but greatly affected how people adopted the filters. One of the challenges here is the influence of Voodoo on culture. Voodoo is a very fear based religion. It involves cursing people and using that fear to manipulate how people interact. When you put that in a community context, it can cause a lot of distrust with neighbors. If you have an issue with someone, or they have an issue with you, they might go to the boko to put a curse on you. Poisoning sounds crazy to most of us, but it does happen here. When we were installing filters in a community space, people were afraid to use them because they didn’t know if people were tampering with things. When you factor in their culture, it makes sense. But, it’s amazing how often this isn’t considered in development projects. Recently we had a site visit with a group and as we sat talking their Haitian staff asked what some of the challenges were and why we didn’t focus things at a community level. When we told them this answer one of them kept nodding and said, “You know Haiti. I’ve never heard anyone mention this, but it’s so true!” Not gonna lie, that felt good. It meant we had figured out something that would allow us to change our programs to better reach the people.

The other major factor in why we no longer focus our efforts at a community level is that doing anything at a community level effectively means the community, as a collective, needs to be involved. In the case of the Bio-sand filters, who’s responsible for maintaining them? What if there’s a problem between that person and someone else in the community? What if they aren’t doing their job? The whole community suffers, and as we see time and time again here, whatever it was that was implemented typically falls into disrepair and stops being used.

So, with those major things in mind, Chris shifted gears with the program and decided to focus on a household level. If we only installed filters in individual homes, the filter owner had complete control over their filter. They no longer had to worry about anyone tampering with it because it would be inside their house. If they had issue with someone, or vice versa, they didn’t need to worry about their filter, and as a result their water, being used to harm them. With that, installing filters at a household level took the responsibility for maintaining the filter off a person chosen by the community or a group, and put that responsibility in the hands of the homeowner.

One more factor in this decision is that we believe in empowering people. We want to give them the opportunity to participate in the solution. By focusing on households we get to work directly with families. Parents can choose to better the health of their family by purchasing a filter. They aren’t reliant on a community system that may or may not be working. They could finally have access to clean water, and they could have control over it. It became something they did, we just provided access and education.

Once we switched to this model and started to put our focus on developing an active filter program things started falling into place. In all honesty, there were a lot of people that doubted our model way back when. It wasn’t typical for industry standards. But, we kept at it.

One of our biggest challenges after we shifted to a subsidized filter program was actually doing the promotion. We would send our technicians out on motorcycles into communities to tell people about the filters, and at the time, were doing an instalment payment system. It was tough! The main reason? Our technicians were going into communities where no one knew them. And then asking people to give them money to pay for their filters. The instalment payments weren’t working because it meant revisiting people multiple times to see if they had the next instalment. It might take months for families to buy their filter, and then we had to track all of that. It was too complicated. Would you believe that it was a high school student that helped us solve this problem?

Back in early 2007 a missionary friend who runs a school said that one of his students, who we knew, asked if there would be a possibility of getting filters into his community. It was very rural, and quite a ways out, but Chris said that if he could sell 20 filters and collect the money from the families ahead of time, we would send the truck and do the delivery and installations. We thought it would take a really long time, but Kesme had 20 orders in two weeks, money and all. We had room on the truck for 25 filters, so that’s what the guys took out on that first load, and when the truck got there people were so excited that they started fighting over who got to buy the extra 5 filters. La Grange had received one of our original filters, and would you believe it was still there, and barely dripping water, but people would sit with a cup under it just to get a cup of clean water!

We told Kesme that if he wanted to keep taking orders, we would keep bringing filters. To our surprise, two weeks later he had another 70 orders. And again, people were buying the extras off the truck. Not long after those deliveries a delegation of people showed up at the mission to tell us that their community was just down the road from La Grange, and they wanted to know how to get filters too. We asked them to delegate a person to take orders, collect the money, and be responsible for contacting our staff. Soon they had their first orders of filters installed, and there was a ripple effect that started to move from one community to another, and our Community Promoter model was started. All because of one high school student who cared about his village.

We still use this Community Promoter model today. We’ve made minor tweaks over the years, but it’s still essentially the same, and is the way that we sell the majority of our filters. It’s an effective method because the promoter is from that area. People know them. Often they’re already some kind of leader that people respect. Because of that, people have confidence in giving them money to purchase their filter. If the promoter doesn’t follow through with what has been committed, then there’s recourse and accountability that can happen on a community level. We have had promoters that have abused the situation, and in every situation we work with the community in whatever way we can to solve the problem.

So, how does this translate into the original question about numbers and impact?

Through this model of Community Promoters we’ve been able to scale up our operations from installing 5-10 filters per month to over 100 filters per month. We now have the facilities to build and deliver 400 filters per month, and that’s our goal as we plan for growth over the coming years.

How many people does a filter serve each day?

Every Bio-sand filter we install typically serves 8-10 people per day. That’s the number we use to estimate impact. It’s the average size of a Haitian household. In that we recognize that some are smaller, but in many cases people are also allowing friends and family to come and filter water at their home. It’s a conservative estimate.

Lets do the math.

We know we’ve installed at least 24,000 filters since we started. Loose estimate, but probably pretty close. We started heavily tracking installations in 2010, and now have records for every single filter we install, as well as info for every follow up visit we do in the first year. This is another thing to talk about, but later…

So, if we multiply 24,000 by 10 people per filter, we get a whopping 240,000 people.

That’s exciting in and of itself, but lets look at a couple of other things.

First, that would be a single impact number. As in, at some point in the past 15 years we’ve provided clean water for a minimum of 240,000 people – one time.

But, the filters we install get used daily. We get blown away when we think about things on those terms. Daily, our program is impacting hundreds of thousands of people. We don’t typically talk those numbers simply because we know a lot of our early filters were abandoned because of holes in our program, but again, we’ve learned a lot from that and let it guide us in how we’ve developed our program.

Second, Haiti has an overall population of about 10 million people. When you look at the total number of filters that we’ve installed compared to the population, we’ve provided access to clean water for almost 2.5% of Haiti’s ENTIRE population.

It continually blows me away to think about that.

At the start of this post I mentioned that we do trainings for other organizations. When we consider all the groups that we’ve trained, some of them have gone on to produce several thousand filters each. Others are smaller and keep plugging away consistently. It’s safe to say that the other organizations that have been trained by Clean Water for Haiti have produced over 10,000 filters. More impact because of what we do.

Now, there’s one very important thing that we haven’t talked about yet, and that’s long term effect.

Many organizations put a lot of emphasis on what we like to call “measurable outcomes” in the development world. These are things that are used to measure the “success” of a program. How many people were part of the program/trained/educated/direct recipients of a program item/service. While those numbers are good, often they’re used to give donors an idea of what’s been done with their funding, and thats all fine and good, but the question we want answered is how effective are we being over the long term?

Donors are investing their funding in our project because they want to see the health of Haitian families improve by having access to clean water. That’s not going to happen with a single use of our filters. It’s a development goal, so that means we need to look at impact over time.

How many people are still using their filters after a specific period of time?

I mentioned our tracking system for our filters, and it’s a key part of what we do. It provides us with that critical info that tells us how we’re doing over the long term. Every filter that we install has an installation form, and that initial information about the installation gets recorded on the form, then entered into a data base. Each filter we install gets visited at 1 month, 3 months, and 1 year after installation. All of the information about the filter at those visits is recorded on the sheet and in the data base. Sounds boring, but for us it’s not.

You see, after a few years of collecting data we had some really exciting information at our finger tips. We had a volunteer with us in 2012/2013, and Ryan was a smart guy, so one of the first projects we gave him was to set up our data base to pull all that info about the installed filters and their condition/state of use after the first year so we could know what our adoption rate was – the number of filters still being used after the first year. If people were still using the filter after a year, it meant they not only understood how to use it, but relied on it for meeting their daily water needs.

Going into the project Chris said that if we were at an adoption rate of 60% he would be really happy. When Ryan finished pulling everything together he told us that he thought we would be really happy with the results. When we asked, partly cringing, he said, “You’re at over 95%!”

I’ve only seen Chris speechless a few times, and that was one of them. We came face to face with the reality that not only had we figured out how to do this well, we were doing it really well.

As time has gone by our numbers have stayed steady at over 95%, and in some years have been over 98%. So when we talk about impact, we can confidently say that most of our filters are still in use after the first year. That’s almost unheard of in the development world.

What we do works. The numbers don’t lie.

~Leslie

This post originally appeared on our old Clean Water for Haiti blog.