The following is from Toni, one of the short term missionaries, who accompanied Bill Plaza to distribute water filters in Haiti.
"My God story is not only what a difference the filters make in the mountains, but watching the ladies making the difference. What is very little known is, 3 of these ladies are from a broken homes with no personal finances to spare. One, divorced and trying to reconcile with recovering drug addict ex husband. Second, with husband that is going through 2 year of clinical depression after loosing his job that he had for 26 years. The third lady, husband an ex police officer that made a mistake in life and is in jail. He accepted Jesus since and she is faithfully waiting for him. Even with that much brokenness, they raised money for 250 units and brought additional funds with them as people were donating for their trip till last moment. Their hearts were so amazing.
We distributed 350 filters between villages of Fron Palmis (150), Cay la Salle (55), Cafee (95). We’ve provided additional 35 filters to Pavilion and TiPlain (25). This leaves us with 40 filters in the storage in Jolie Gilbert in addition to 400 already purchased and on the way (this Friday) to the same storage in the mountains."
Our next group arrives this Saturday and we leave for the mountains on Sunday. Please pray for us during the week as we touch hearts of those in the mountains.
This group will distribute filters to village called Gelin, it has around 420 homes. It takes 1.5 hours hiking time from the road (Haitian time), so I figure that it will take us about 5 hours round trip. The distribution will be done through the village leaders by the main road.

To date with this upcoming distribution we will have 1400 filters distributed over the last 2 years. I am very happy to say that Sawyer filters have been performing very well. We had some reports of 14 filters with broken hoses in Pavilion and 4 in TiPlaine. But after showing Espri how to cut the broken piece off and and slip remaining hose on the fitting, he was able to fix all of the filter hoses and all of them are back in operation. Now the leaders know it as well!

I am also happy to report that in the village of Cay La Salle, one of our Haiti partners is building a feeding center. Unfortunately, village does not have any water source and they have to walk almost 2 hours one way for water. Well, with buying the filters in bulk (800 units), we received a very nice discount! between the money saved from purchase of the filters, additional money collected by the first group of ladies and some trip expense money from the trip we (IFJ) will be building a cistern in this village. We have negotiated a price with the builder of the feeding center to build a 12’X12’X10’ deep cistern. Once the Stone and stucco walls are build, we will install a roof over the cistern. Both, the feeding center building and the cistern roof will feed this 11,000 gal water catchment. This is our (IFJ’s) first water solution project in the mountains and Renee and I are very excited about this project. We will be doing some gutter improvement project at the guesthouse where we stay in the mountains as well!.

All of your prayers for our teams and the cistern project will be appreciated.