Fight childhood disease with safe drinking water

Dear Friends and Supporters-
In this holiday season, a time of thanksgiving and good will, we come together with each other to celebrate, give thanks and look forward to a new year.  I want to personally wish each of you good health and best wishes for the season.
In Haiti, cholera has returned and is again striking the most vulnerable in the population, the poor, the elderly and especially the children. Over 3,000 new cases have been reported and several hundred deaths.  The majority of the deaths have been in young children under 5.

Currently Agua Pura has 4 separate teams of trained Haitian volunteers working in different areas of their country promoting water testing, sanitation and water purification. Two of our teams are in the South where there have been new outbreaks. Cholera and contaminated water go together, where diarrheal disease is, cholera may also be. 

One team recently visited a remote community where they found a highly contaminated spring which was their only water source. We are now organizing a return visit to provide  needed sanitary and water purification supplies to the families and instructions about how to protect themselves from disease.I've included photos from this visit.

Agua Pura with your support is the only organization doing this work in these areas, and we are planning more surveys to similar communities.  All of us are volunteers and 100% of  your donations go to furthering the work.
Thank you for your continued support on GlobalGiving for over 10 years.
Tom Carter

p.s. I'm including a  link to a graphic vidio about cholera.This video is produced in many languages around the world to teach people how to protect themselves against the disease.

Links:

• A video about cholera

Mamno is a volunteer team leader for Agua Pura in Haiti. He and his team live in an area that recently suffered a damaging earthquake, as well as flooding from excessive rain. Now he is reporting a different and increasing problem in the communities he helps: poisoning and illnesses caused by misuse of agricultural chemicals.
 
Subsistence farmers search for anything that might help them grow more food to eat, and to sell. They purchase pesticides and weed killers to apply to their crops, but receive little or no training and do not have information about the dangers of the chemicals to themselves and their families.  Manmo observes that they are mis-applying the chemicals in dangerous concentrations.  This is not only bad for the crops, but also contaminates drinking water. There are frequent cases of whole families becoming sick by the chemicals. Some of the chemicals are known carcinogens.
 
Mamno and his team are preparing to meet with local farmers to help them learn how to safely use the chemicals and how to protect themselves.  He will be providing gloves, masks and other materials for them to use.  Your donations through GlobalGiving are helping make this possible.
 
We think this is an emergency and we want to help prevent the farm families from getting sick now, but Agua Pura supports farmers moving away from the use of agricultural chemicals to safer, non toxic, less expensive organic farming methods. We sponsor recycling and composting programs in Haiti and elsewhere.  Mamno will also be talking to the farmers about this and how they can grow their crops more profitably with less chemicals.
 
Thank you so much for your support of Agua Pura and our work. The money you have donated has saved many lives.