In November 1998, in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, Dr. George Greene III, his wife Molly and a small team of volunteer employees from General Engineering Laboratories crossed the washed out roads of Honduras into a small town.
They pulled into a community carrying the first-ever Living Water Treatment System on the back of a pickup truck.
The system, constructed of plywood, treated lumber and a 55-gallon water drum, was designed and built by the staff at General Engineering Laboratories. Its purpose: to supply temporary access to sustainable, safe, clean water to a developing country.
They parked near a small mud house, beside a small creek. Greene decided this would be the place to set up the system. They could use the creek to pull and generate clean water.
People began to gather and watch as the missions team constructed the unit. Within a couple of hours the system was assembled and ready for operation.
The team, none more than Greene, were anxious. He thought to himself, “I hope this thing works?”
By this time the whole town became bystanders, watching as this small group of Americans shuttled up and down the embankment, connecting hoses, twisting levers, tightening bolts and screws to and from this Rube Goldberg-like machine.
“We cranked it up and low and behold crystal clear water starts coming out,” remembers Greene. “We were more excited than the townspeople.”
But there was a problem.
“Nobody would drink it,” said Greene. “We hadn’t noticed but it turned out that the name of that creek we were pulling water from was called the River of Death. Kids were told to stay away from it and nobody would go near it.”
A Pentecostal pastor, who was at the scene and witnessed the reaction, began talking to the people of the town. He told the crowd, “These people have come to us with a gift and this was a gift from God. They are taking water from the River of Death and turning it into Living Water. You don’t need to be afraid of the River of Death anymore.”
Still, there was some hesitation. “We had to drink the water to convince them it was OK,” said Greene. The Honduras community couldn’t believe their eyes. They watched as Greene and the GEL staff started gulping down cups of water from the River of Death.
“They just started praying and hand-raising, it was just an incredible experience,” remembers Greene. “You knew you changed a paradigm.”
The moment is etched in Greene’s memory. It is a mental snapshot of the vision that the Greene’s had since September 30, 2000. It is the essence of what is known today as Water Missions International, the faith-based nonprofit organization in West Ashley.
In the Fall of 2000, two years after their missions trip to Honduras, Greene and his wife Molly had grown discontent. General Engineering Laboratories – or GEL – opened its doors in 1982. It was a leader in the industry, specializing in environmental consulting and water quality testing. Business was flourishing.
But it wasn’t about money or business, it was about purpose. On that Saturday in September George and Molly Greene went searching for answers.
“We spent the day on the back porch with three books: The Bible, a book called Halftime and a book called Deep Change,” said Greene, who used the books as reference. “Molly and I came in not really knowing what we needed to accomplish … we committed to talk and pray our way through it to get the Lord’s guidance. By the end of the day, it was clear he was telling us to shift our focus from environmental issues in the United States to the global water crisis.”
Nearly three years after Hurricane Mitch battered Honduras, and GEL responded, Water Missions International was born.
The seed was first planted on October 22, 1998, the day Hurricane Mitch ripped through Honduras. Greene was driving back from a meeting in Atlanta, listening to the word pictures of destruction on the radio. He knew almost nothing about Honduras and, in all honesty, serving the country wasn’t a concept that particularly interested Greene.
“When [Hurricane] Mitch hit Honduras, I felt the Lord was saying to me, ‘you need to do something,” said Greene. “ But I have a tendency, when the Lord says ‘go do something,’ I try and negotiate,” said Greene.
But Greene felt a spiritual tug. He knew he needed to make an effort.
When he returned to Charleston, Greene went back to his office and sent an email to the one person he knew who lived in Honduras: the Bishop of Honduras. Greene offered his support and asked how he could help. Not thinking he could offer much more than money or supply donations, Greene was surprised the next morning when, in his email inbox there was a reply. The bishop specifically requested – not money, not food, not clothing – but six drinking water units.
Greene was shocked by the promptness of the response and the specificity. Again, he was being nudged spiritually, this time with a distinct, express request. The message was now crystal clear.
But another hurdle emerged. Until then, GEL was a consulting business. They did not produce drinking water systems. So, Greene made some phone calls only and learned the systems available would not fit their needs or were too expensive. It was back to the drawing board – literally. Greene and the GEL staff began working feverishly, attempting to design a custom water system solution for the people of Honduras.
“I call it an adult science fair project,” says Greene. The staff at GEL was working on the system during their lunch breaks, in free time, in the evening. “People were so excited about it, morale went through the roof,” said Greene. “There was really just a buzz around the building. It was a really neat experience.”
Within a week, the team of engineers at GEL had designed a functional water drinking system.
While the system was being constructed, Molly Greene (George Greene’s wife) was organizing a transportation effort to get the systems from South Carolina to Honduras. Within a few short weeks, Greene, 17 members of the GEL staff, 50 tons of supplies and six water systems boarded a C5 at the Charleston Air Force Base and headed for Ground Zero: Honduras.
“There was still bodies floating in the rivers, it was terrible,” remembers Greene. “The roads were washed out. Honduras is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere to begin with. So it was a pretty dismal place.”
The team spent Thanksgiving week of 1998 in Honduras setting up water systems. They slept on tables at the military base in Honduras. “That was a great Thanksgiving,” remembers Greene.
It was the beginning of what would evolve into Water Missions International. The first system was not as refined as today’s, it was only designed to last six weeks, a temporary solution. Today’s Living Water Treatment System has been revised 12 times.
A full system takes an estimated 40 man hours to design, all from volunteer efforts. In a large warehouse in West Ashley, like clockwork, volunteers design, test, disassemble and package the Living Water Treatment Systems for shipment. The process is refined and efficient. Today, the complete system is packaged with all the treatment materials, including tools to assemble. In fact, Water Missions International has begun testing solar-powered systems, the next evolution of technology. The first two are scheduled to be deployed in Haiti and Uganda before 2008.
According to Water Missions International volunteer coordinator Christy Witcher, the non profit has a database of 220 volunteers designing water treatment systems year round.
“We have a lot of regular volunteers, who know what they’re doing and they have a regular day,” said Witcher. “We have new volunteers who cycle in and each week we have one volunteer orientation session [30 minutes], then they sign up for their first day and then its one-the-job training from there.”
“When church groups and volunteers come in here and work, it’s a very humbling experience,” said Greene. “It says to me that they believe in what we’re doing.”
Today, 343 Living Water Treatment Systems are serving nearly one million people around the world according to Danya Jordan, the vice president of Development for Water Missions International. The nonprofit organization has installed water systems in 28 countries, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Kenya, Haiti, Iraq, Peru, Singapore, Belize, Mozambique, Thailand, Turkey, Rwanda, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, El Salvador – and the Gulf Coast of the United States.
But the numbers are still lob-sided, so much so, they frankly leave you breathless: 20 percent of the world’s population lacks access to water (“Access is defined, not by going in to your kitchen and turning a tap on, but having to walk less than one kilometer to a source of clean water,” says Greene). 2.4 billion people lack access to sanitation.
“There is no sewage treatment in developing countries – or it’s rare,” Greene added. “Waste water treatment is, at best, being collected in the home, through a pipe and discharged into the rivers. That is killing the rivers, there’s no life, they’re muddy, cess pools and that’s what people are using for water and that’s why they’re dying.”
25,000 people die every day.
Greene drives home that number, saying, “So, if we talk for an hour, 1,000 people are going to die.”
Water is essential for life. People can survive for up to two months without food, but die within three days without water.
“The tragedy of it is … it doesn’t have to be,” says Greene. “We’re not dealing with an incurable disease here. There is virtually no contaminant known to man that we don’t have the technology to remove. There’s no water source anywhere in the world that can’t be made drinkable.”
Water Missions International is realistic about the process. Greene realizes his team of 12 full-time employees, four satellite offices and some 220 volunteers who build the systems are just a link in the chain. It will take a massive community effort to accomplish the goal.
“This isn’t going to happen single-handedly by a little non-profit organization operating out of the back of a church in Charleston, South Carolina,” said Greene. “I see this huge, messy network. I describe it as ‘a spider web of organizations.’ Water Missions may be at the hub or it may be on the rim, I don’t know? If you can picture the nods of a spider web, they’re all connected. Some of them are vendors, some of them are country programs, some are governments. That begins to multiply pretty fast.”
Water Missions International has a simple, two-fold mission: one, to provide treatment systems and two, to share their faith in the process. It sounds simple enough, but in the nonprofit world, politics sometimes get in the way of progress.
“I feel a sense of frustration because I find us dealing with things that are, what I would classify as bureaucratic,” said Greene. “While people are dying we’re sitting here arguing or debating about, is what we’re doing going to pass tax codes? I find that very frustrating.”
It may frustrate Greene, even wear him down at times, but it doesn’t stop him. As a matter of fact, it drives the organization to succeed. Greene doesn’t care for the word can’t, as in, “that can’t be done.”
He has photographic proof refuting the idea. It’s a image that hangs on the office wall, in the hallway at Water Missions International. In it, Johann Nietsch, the country missions director in Uganda standing with a small group of Ugandans. The man on the left drinks a brown liquid, it looks like ice tea but it’s Uganda’s drinking water. The man on the right drinks of crystal clear water treated by the Living Water Treatment System.
“The people there who saw it said there was just a look of disbelief, they started dancing and started crying and laughing … all the emotions just came out at once,” said Greene. “When you’re in the field and you set up a system and you see that dirty water come out clean, and you see the looks on those peoples face, it’s the first time they’ve ever seen clean water.”
It’s those experiences, those moments, that renew the vision and keep the dream alive for Greene and the staff at Water Missions International.
