Rain Catchers Bring Clean Water to Needy
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Social
Bob Keesee's Homemade Rain-catching Systems Collects Precious Water for the Poor in Haiti
For as long as she can remember, octogenarian Mrs. Felix Ville had spent three hours of every day walking to and from a muddy, often contaminated stream for water. So had all the women in Seguin, a remote village high inHaiti's rugged mountains.
Then a Michigan insurance salesman and inveterate do-it-yourselfer showed up with some plastic pipe, bits of screen, a few tools, and an idea that both his neighbors back home and the Haitian villagers thought was just plain nuts.
Keesee first went to Haiti nearly 20 years ago with a group that planned to build a church that could also be used as a clinic and school. When he saw how far women had to walk to get water, and the desperate efforts people made to collect rainwater, he knew he had to do something.
The elders offer a stream of advice to him, to each other, and to the steamy air endlessly full of dust. Teenagers help hold tools or brackets, and the little ones play in a tangle of castoff bits of plastic tubes and pipe. The Rube Goldberg-looking invention Keesee and his team of volunteers fasten on shack roofs today is basically a gutter made from a length of PVC pipe, tubing, brackets, strapping, and a plastic barrel. His device collects, filters, and contains rainwater - and it changes lives.
He tried all sorts of things. He made fasteners from plastic zip ties and automotive hose clamps, flexible tubing from backyard swimming-pool hoses, and water filters from needlepoint screens or washing machine filters. He returned to Haiti again and again, installing and testing each version of the contraption.
Whenever he found his rain catcher stolen, broken, or still less than perfect, he returned to his Michigan backyard, where he had built his own Haitian-style roof to test his product. He prayed for rain because each downpour meant he could go out back, study his makeshift roof, and tinker. "My neighbors looked over their fences and gaped at me soaking wet in the rain. I could tell they thought I was crazy," Keesee says.
He finally came up with a device that was hurricane-proof, could deter thieves, was simple to repair, and maximized the amount of water captured from the rain.
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