The area of Roch Tampe, Haiti, is named for unusual rock carvings etched a long time ago by the island’s people. Children play around the rock and trace the grooves of the ancient designs. Nearby their friends and neighbors wait with buckets at a spring. In Haiti, people often carry things on their heads instead of with their arms and hands, so bigger children help to lift and steady the heavy water containers on the heads of smaller ones.
Krista Moyer, MCC worker, learns many things from her neighbors in Roch Tampe. She also lets them know that they can keep their spring water clean by capping the spring. Capping means building a wall and basin around the spring to protect it from impurities. In a place where children sometimes die from diarrhea caused by drinking impure water, making sure the spring is kept clean is the first step towards healthier and happier living.
School children in Roch Tampe got a special recess on the day the community capped its local spring. The teacher led lines of kids up the road to the spring and very soon girls were toting huge buckets of sand and boys were searching the streambed for rocks for the adults to use in building the cement protective wall. The children’s mothers prepare food for the workers, both big and small. Everyone could help in some way to bring clean water and better health to the village.
You can help too! If you collect $6.00 USD / $9.25 CDN worth of pennies and other change during your Penny Power effort, you could supply one water quality test kit for a spring. A test kit tells the village whether its water is clean or if it will make children sick. $70 USD / $108 CDN would provide enough cement to cap one spring and $442 USD / $680 CDN covers the cost of all materials and labor for that process. $9,000 USD / $13,846 CDN (that’s a lot of pennies!) supports one MCC worker, like Krista, in Haiti for one year.
Penny Power raises money for MCC projects of peace, relief and development around the world.