Vanuatu water project

A few years back I had the privilege of meeting and working with Wade and Erica over in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Wade and Erica work with YWAM in New Zealand and are pretty swell Kiwi’s if I do say so myself. Last summer I lead a Steps of Justice team back over to Cambodia and Wade and Erica helped us greatly. They had this wild idea to start a house building project over in Phnom Penh. You can read more about this here, and sign up to come with us this summer here.

 

One of the things I love about Wade and Erica is their practicality. They see a need and figure out how they can practically meet it. A while ago Wade and Erica started taking teams of Kiwi’s to Vanuatu. While there they noticed the need for clean water, the rest is history. Check it below.

“In Vanuatu, the majority of water is unsafe to drink. Water systems in urban areas only serve 20% of Vanuatu’s population, while the remaining 80% of people living in rural areas rely upon much less safe drinking water. Unclean drinking water is a major contributing factor of diarrhea, which is a common cause of death in developing countries such as Vanuatu, and the second most common cause of infant deaths worldwide. You can therefore greatly improve the quality of life for whole communities by building concrete water tanks to store rainwater. Rainwater collection is an important part of the rural water supply of Vanuatu as this protects water from pollution, and enables a constant supply of water during drier seasons.

You can be a key part in improving the quality of life for many people in Vanuatu by funding the cost of a water tank, and then travelling to Vanuatu to build it firsthand! Each tank is constructed from locally sourced materials, and then put together in a way that encourages local villagers to work alongside your team as a community project. This allows the local people to gain a sense of ownership in the tank, so that when your team goes home they will maintain it as their own. The water tank is built alongside a large community building, allowing fresh rainwater to be collected via the roof guttering, and then stored inside the enclosed tank. Each tank will take around 6-8 days to build under the guidance of a local foreman, and will store approximately 7000 litres of water.”

To see more of what Wade and Erica are doing check it here and watch the below video to see how clean water saves lives.