When we turn on the faucet in Vermont, we expect clean water. But for a third of the world, safe drinking water can’t be taken for granted. Native Vermonter, Carolyn Meub is Executive Director of Pure Water for the World, a non profit run out of Rutland that’s been tackling this issue in Central America and Haiti.
(Meub) They don’t have what we have; don’t have clean, safe drinking water; they don’t have a toilet in or outside their home. It’s not that they don’t want it, it’s that they don’t have the means and they may not even understand the importance of it.
(Stoddard) For the last 5 years, Pure Water has enabled more than a half million people to have access to clean water with affordable water filtration systems and, as importantly, hygiene education.
(Meub) Forty percent of water born diseases can be illuminated by teaching how to wash hands, because people… cant see what’s on their hands can make them sick. We’re asking people to change habits, and by doing that children and families will be healthier; healthy kids go to school...
(Stoddard) For Meub, a positive sign toward sustainable impact is when communities, like the hillside town of Butta Chia, Haiti, show a willingness to invest in clean water
(Meub) The community collected $4 from every family. These are people who live on a dollar a day. It’s certainly going to be donor funded but they have skin in the game. The people in the community have to want it and they have to have a need and have to have to understand the benefit of because they will learn how to wash their hands and learn to maintain the filters.
(Stoddard) Pure Water for the World was started when a dentist from the Brattleboro Rotary Club experienced dire need while on a medical mission in El Salvador. As the work outgrew the club’s capacity, a non profit was born that carries Rotarian and Vermont roots.
(Meub) The whole Rotary International movement… was created in Chicago but it was by a man who grew up in Wallingford and the values he found lacking in Chicago was that friendliness, that willingness to help other people… there is something about Vermonters and the Vermont spirit that is to help people who are in other situations they don’t have to be next-door… when the earthquake in Haiti hit three and half years ago… a little girl came to the door and had a bag of money and it was all her tooth fairy money because she had heard something about the children of Haiti. And while this happens throughout the country, I think that it goes to the spirit of who we are because we are hardscrabble…
(Stoddard) Whether it’s barn raising, or emergencies in our backyard or a foreign country, native Vermonter Carolyn Meub thinks helping out is the essence of who we are.
