Saving Lives for Less than $2 a Month
by Melanie Brooks, CARE

Safe water kits distributed by CARE have helped children like Lani remain healthy (Photos © 2005 CARE/Melanie Brooks)

Two-year-old Lani watches curiously as a CARE worker pours water from a jerry can into a tiny glass vial and inserts the vial into a little black box. A message flashes on a digital screen, and the CARE health team breaks into smiles. The water is clean.

Every day, Lani’s mother puts a capful of chlorine solution from a plastic bottle into a jerry can full of water. Lani is too young to realize it, but the little plastic bottle is the reason she’s healthy, laughing and running around with the other children in the temporary camp where her family has lived since the tsunami wiped out their village.

Since the disaster struck on December 26, 2004, CARE has distributed 65,000 bottles of Safe Water System (SWS), a chlorine solution that disinfects contaminated water, making it safe to drink.

For a cost of just $1.60, CARE can provide enough solution to clean water for a family of five for a month. In the temporary camps where survivors have gathered, safe water saves lives; for a vulnerable youngster like Lani, waterborne diseases like diarrhea or cholera can quickly be fatal.

Over the next six months, CARE will distribute safe water kits to more than 500,000 people in Indonesia.

“There’s a long tradition of boiling water in Indonesia to purify it, but after the tsunami hit, people had no kerosene or pots to boil the water,” said Dr. Endang Widyastuti, the head of CARE’s emergency health team in Aceh. “But after a disaster like this, you have to make sure you have safe water right away, or people will get sick and die from waterborne diseases.”

CARE teams distribute the SWS to people affected by the tsunami, provide training on how to use the solution, and then follow up with visits to ensure people are using it properly. CARE also distributes 20-liter jerry cans with the SWS, so people can safely store the treated water.

M. Daud, the leader of one of the villages that fled to the Posko Seulimeum temporary camp, proudly says disease isn’t a problem since CARE delivered SWS bottles to the camp’s 2,500 people.

“There is no diarrhea here,” says M. Daud, pouring a cup of treated water from a jerry can and offering it to his visitors. “My children are healthy. We know how to treat the water with the SWS to make it safe and now we don’t worry.”

The small size of the bottles also means CARE can easily load boxes of SWS onto boats and get the water treatment to a large number of people in a relatively light shipment. “In some areas, aid agencies can use tanker trucks to transport clean water. But on the west coast of Aceh, where the roads have been totally destroyed, this is a lifesaver,” says Dr. Endang. “We have sent the SWS by boat to isolated communities, and now they have safe water.”

With funding from the U.S and Canadian governments and the European Union, CARE has ordered a total of 1.8 million bottles of SWS, enough to purify water for about 500,000 people over the next six months.