The Rotary Club of Bowmanville Generously Supports Adopt-a-Village-in-Laos

With the end in sight of Rotary’s campaign to end polio, the popular question is, ‘What’s next’?  Steve Rutledge, founder of Adopt A Village in Laos and a fellow Rotarian from the Whitby Sunrise Club, hopes that the next campaign is Clean Water.  “There is so much sickness and death in the world caused by contaminated water, yet it is completely preventable,” he explains.

Case-in-point, Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world and it is still recovering.  With the exception of a few cities, much of the country does not have access to a year round supply of clean water.  This is where Mr. Rutledge becomes involved.  “Currently, infant mortality is still around 8% and we are attacking this statistic head-on.”  To date their organization, whose main focus is clean water, schools and toilets, has completed five water projects, built a number of schools, constructed toilets with running water for every school (plus 10 banks for a large village), and has installed 1377 water filters systems providing over 10,000 rural families, schools and medical clinics/hospitals with clean water.


          Trekking through the jungle to find a water source

          Typical dam construction


      9.2 km of trenching for the water pipe (12 days of work by the entire village)


          Very happy villagers

This year Steve has a lot more on his plate.  With a target of 500 water filter systems to serve another 4,000 rural villagers, plus two more sizeable water projects, two toilet banks and a 7^th school, the challenge is overpowered by sheer determination.  He recalls the first village they supplied water filters to.

“I remember very well the 84 families waiting for us at the river bank after a 1 ½ hour trek and a long delay in getting there.  It was quite a sight to behold but then I had the task of informing them that they couldn’t use the filters until I provided a hygiene training course and that it wouldn’t be until the next day.  Once I returned with an entourage, the 84 families sat in front of me as I began by asking them through a show of hands (and by interpreter), how many of them had experienced diarrhea in the last 6 months.  Of course every man, woman and child raised their hands.  Returning three months later to inspect the units and to find out what the effects were since my last visit, I was pleasantly surprised that only two people put up their hands when asked the same question.  With very sheepish grins on their faces, they confirmed that they had forgotten to take their water with them to their farm field.  I was amazed at the difference a $75 water filter could make.”  Since that day he has never looked back.


115 filters distributed to ½ of the village of PhonSavanh and recycled soccer uniforms provided


          A happy Lao family receiving their filter system.

This year, the Rotary Club of Bowmanville has donated $10,500 towards Steve’s projects.  $2,000 has been set aside for school desks as speaker gifts.  Each desk will get a name plate and a picture of the desk with students will be emailed to the speaker.  The other $8,500 is targeted towards the construction of a dam, water tank, several km of pipe, and water taps throughout the village.  Once completed the kids will have the time to go to school, bathe regularly, and wash their clothes more than once a month.  Mike Yap, who assists Steve with the Laos projects, recalls the unpleasant scent whenever he went near the kids and notes that many of the younger ones ran around nude in the poorest village we have seen in Laos.  Steve’s first impressions of the village was seeing an elderly bare-breasted lady carrying 7 containers of water up a very steep, muddy hill back to the village. 

“I can’t imagine how she could do it!  I had trouble with the slippery, muddy slopes going down and carrying nothing but a camera and a light knapsack, let alone coming back up again with so many containers”, he says.

Adopt A Village in Laos has already provided water filters to each family in this village of Katang Xieng and solar panels for light.  With the all-clear given late last season, they not only plan to complete the water project there but will construct toilets with running water and build a school.

“With the generous support of The Rotary Club of Bowmanville and other Rotary Clubs including the Rotary Clubs of Oshawa and Pickering, this village has a chance at providing a better life for its villagers.  Most of all, we are providing the villagers with hope.”


The Village of Katang Xiang, where a permanent water supply and a school will be built

Providing water filters to the rural villagers isn’t enough though.  Without proper training for each family, the result is never guaranteed.  “We tend to do entire villages at a time and it is difficult to get the families together at the same time as the distribution and training.  One of the issues that had been bothering me for some time was that we often go for meals in the villages and are greeted with a back bucket with a few inches of water in the bottom.  As guests, we are invited to wash our hands first, before dinner and then dry our hands on this disgusting looking towel.  Everyone who eats with us, washes their hands in the same water and same bucket.  Most of the food is eaten with their hands of course so it was pretty easy to see why there is so much sickness in the villages – through the sharing of contaminated water. 

Last year I decided to take a different approach.  I brought different colours of sparkles and in front of the villagers I put the first chief and the second chief side by side and we pretended that one had diarrhea and the other one had a bad cold.  With the sparkles representing bacteria, I sprinkled one colour on the Chiefs hands and another colour on the second chiefs hands.  Asking them to shake hands with their neighbors sitting beside them, the neighbors declined citing that they would not shake hands with a sick person.  So, I brought out the bucket of water and asked the two chiefs to wash their hands and invited the neighbors to wash their hands too.  Once that was complete, they all looked at their hands and realized that they had been infected because everyone was covered in sparkles.  Indeed the light bulb went on!  Finally!

Since then, sickness has been significantly reduced.  With a water supply and a new school, we have no doubts that productivity and education will improve too.

For more information about Adopt A Village in Laos, please follow their blog at http://AdoptAVillageinLaos.wordpress.com



Sincere thanks to Steve Rutledge for providing the copy for this story.