Blue Hills. It sounds like a country club. It isn’t.
I had never heard of it until someone called me on the phone and asked me if I would help get this place some water. They didn’t have clean water to drink. Blue Hills is an area of Cap Hatien—and I go to Cap Hatien every year. So we got our CRF person there, Moise Toussaint, to have a well drilled there. Then on my current trip to Haiti, we would put in a purification system to make sure the water was good to drink.
I think that more people will die from cholera in Haiti than from the earthquake. Water is a problem. Or maybe I should say a lack of water is a problem. Maybe I should say it’s the biggest crisis facing the world outside of our spiritual one.
Unclean water kills a child every twenty seconds. You have heard me talk about the AIDS pandemic. Dirty water will cause more deaths than AIDS this year. One in six people in the world don’t have access to clean water. If you don’t know the world’s population—that’s over a billion people. In many places, women and children have to walk as many as four to five hours every day to get water. And the water they get will probably kill them because it is so polluted. Do you get it?
So I was glad to help bring water to Blue Hills. Water is now flowing. You don’t even have to pump it. It flows constantly. We don’t have a purification system on it yet, but we dug so deep—it may not need much.
I love seeing the hundreds of people gather at the water. I never saw a time that someone didn’t have a bucket under the flowing water. It was one of the happiest sights that I’ve ever seen. Free water freely flowing.
I did find some other water in the community. It was a well on the property of a church. They kept their pump locked. If anyone came around and needed some water, they charged for it. They not only charged for it, but it was a price that few could pay. To my understanding, another charitable organization like CRF gave the well to this church. They freely received, but they don’t freely give. Something is just kind of wrong with that—don’t you think?
Milt, this is absolutely wonderful that you and CRF made this happen and now these people can have an abundance of clean running water. In a million years they couldn’t afford to get this to happen, and most likely so many were giving up on Hope… Not now, because they can drink freely, and praise God above that you had the drive to see this through! I’m so proud of you Milt, I’m proud that you are my friend, and that you have the heart of love, that you do!
I want to personally thank you, and each person at CRF who works so hard every day to make a difference in so many lives around the world. Thank you for showing us all how to live a legacy in this lifetime, and one that will keep going for many years after we are gone!