Rotary program talks on water quality

SIDNEY -- John Bunyan once said "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never pay you back."

An account of this way of thinking was explained to the Cheyenne County Rotary Club Thursday, March 14.

President-Elect Forrest Hershberger talked about his visits to Central America and the challenges of clean water.

"In 2010, I was given the opportunity to go on a mission trip. In June 2011, I was on-board to go to Nicaragua. It was the first in probably several firsts in that experience," he said.

Hershberger said prior to accepting the opportunity, he had never been on a mission trip, never flown on a commercial airline and had never been out of the country. He had also never seen some of the simple things we in the United States take for granted treated as a luxury.

"Among things that I learned on that trip, is the value of clean and plentiful water. I met people who were literally still living on surface water, by the simplest definition even, where sanitation is sometimes a luxury. On our trip to this part of Nicaragua, we were actually schooled to not depend on tap water," he said in his presentation.

Team members were told to use bottled water for brushing teeth, and to avoid ingesting as much water as possible when showering. The concern was bacteria that might be present in the water. 

The areas we visited were of people who worked hard when they could find work, and did what they needed to have a home; sometimes building a shelter literally from sticks and cut or fallen branches. 

He said his trips to Nicaragua, more than one, included helping build churches and classrooms, and one year a home. The bricks were made, almost what could be called a home business, a few miles from the work site.

"The area was dry enough that we would be soaking the bricks in a barrel before they go onto a wall you're building,"

He said volunteers were told dry bricks would draw moisture from the mortar and compromise the integrity of the wall.  On memory that he said stands out is when a Nicaraguan woman took a drink from the barrel of soaking bricks; but then a reddish color from the dissolving material.

One of the trips included a visit to a neighboring community where team members partnered with  a local Rotary Club to distribute water filtering systems called a bio-sand filter. The team was told the average life expectancy in the area, reliant on surface water, was 50 to 60 years. A year later after using the bio-sand filters, life expectancy improved significantly.