Bay piti, pa chich.

To give a little is not being cheap.

Last Friday, I embarked with a team of four Haitians to fix the water system at Bel-Aire, a remote village about a two-hour hike due east of where I stay. The system is quite simple: a capped spring collects water and gravity carries it through a treatment system we constructed a year and a half ago before being stored in a cistern with two taps.

We originally built the treatment system in 2013 in an effort to mitigate cholera in the region. That village, and the surrounding area, had the highest incident rate of cholera than anywhere else around the Central Plateau where we are located. Today, cholera is not an issue in Bel-Aire anymore due to their new clean water and the vaccine campaigns of other NGOs in the area.

Over the past few weeks, while I have not been working at Morne Michel, I have been collecting materials to fix this water system. The piping from the spring to the treatment was broken and as a result people were drinking unfiltered water. On Friday, having finally purchased the proper fittings and threading the proper lengths of pipe, we departed with over 60 feet of galvanized pipe and a backpack full of various couplings, unions, and elbows.

I thought we had a 50% chance of actually fixing it that day. Bel-Aire is infamous for its incredible humidity and lack of shade. In addition to the struggles with heat, I didn’t know exactly what to expect once we got there. I knew what the problem was but I was convinced that we would find more problems once we arrived.

As it turns out, we did have to improvise but at the end of the day we got everything up and running again.  The people of Bel-Aire have clean water once more. Even though our solution may not be pretty (it involved some unorthodox piping strategies), it works and that is what matters.