Project Sekong 2013: No Village Can Be A Healthy Village Without Clean Water

There are places in Laos that get more than eighty inches of rain a year, and the Lao countryside is laced with rivers and streams. Still, many villages do not have a dependable source of clean drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that forty per cent of the Lao people drink water from insecure sources.

During the dry season a lot of animal waste accumulates throughout villages. Then, when the rainy season begins, a great quantity of animal and human feces washes into rivers, streams and even village wells. Seasonal rains clean and brighten the countryside and foster vigorous, attractive plant growth, but they also bring diarrhea and other illnesses to villages that rely on insecure sources of water.

In our camp, we keep kettles of water boiling over fires throughout the day so we have a dependable source of water for drinking, cooking, and washing our dishes.

Last year, as our project was winding down, two villages asked us to clear the path so they could lay plastic pipe from a pure mountain stream to a village tap. In each case the line was about a kilometer long. To our pleasure and everyone’s surprise we were able to clear the two paths in less than two days. It’s sad to think that for years the only thing that stood in the way of a village having clean dependable drinking water was the fear of UXO.