John Brainerd spoke about Rotary’s water program in Myanmar. Major activity in Myanmar is agriculture – even orphanages grown gardens. However, due to a lack of infrastructure, children had to walk to a river to fill buckets and carry them quite a distance back to the orphanage garden. Instead of attending school and socializing children were carrying buckets of water back and forth to take care of the garden.
Two and a half billion people lack access to clean water. Each year 1.8 million people die from diarrhea, much of it cause from severe diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Eighty-eight percent of deaths are due to unsafe water or inadequate sanitation or hygiene, and 1.4 million are children ages five and younger, according to the World Health Organization. Malnutrition- related deaths of children five and under caused by unsafe water, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient hygiene total 860,000 a year.
When Rotary inquired further as to what Myanmar needed most – physicians in Myanmar stated they needed permanent water projects. Though a daunting project, Rotary agreed and has already designed and built 15 of the 60 requested systems. Working with Save the Children and the Myanmar Compassion Project, the project is serving 200 orphanages. Seventy to eighty percent of the water is used for agriculture, ten percent is used for kitchen use, and ten percent is used for laundry. The children now have time for school and social activities. Newport continues to work with Maesai Rotary to keep the project alive.
To find out more about the Myanmar Water Project, including the project’s entire history and how to make donations go to: http://www.myanmarwater.org/
