Water is Life

This is a great article about my friend Curt Ward and the Gilbert Rotary club… They have done so much … Really proud of them and honored to be able to partner with them in person on occasion. eClub Rotarian Jean  ~ Read the complete story in the July 2022 issue of the Rotary Magazine.

If there were one place on the planet impervious to the ravages of the pandemic, you might have guessed it would be the Navajo Nation. Viewed from a distance, it seems impregnable, a remote, self-contained country spread across three U.S. states - Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah - and encompassing more than 27,000 square miles, its ancient boundaries marked by four sacred mountains: Dibe Ntsaa (Hesperus Mountain) on the north, Tsoodzil (Mount Taylor) on the south, Sisnaajini (Blanca Peak) on the east, and Dook'o'oosliid (San Francisco Peaks) on the west.

As it turns out, you would have guessed wrong. Terribly wrong. The first cases of COVID-19 in Navajo Nation were diagnosed in March 2020, the outbreak spread by a church gathering in a small town in northeastern Arizona. Two months later, there had been 100 pandemic deaths in Navajo Nation, which reported a higher per capita infection rate than any of the SO U.S. states.

As of mid-May 2022, more than 53,000 COVID cases had been confirmed there - that's a 32 percent infection rate - and 1,770 deaths.

With a population of about 165,000, there has been one death for every 93 people living in the Nation. "That's a huge percentage of our population," laments Emma Robbins, who grew up not far from the Grand Canyon. "It hit all of us hard on the reservation. We lost so many Elders, and so we've lost libraries of wisdom, language, tradition. That's something we'll never get back. That's not just a loss of life; it's a loss of our culture. It highlighted what has always existed: We don't have the same things that other Americans do."

Robbins knows all about the shortage of water in the Nation, only she learned about it firsthand. She'd grown up in Tuba City- which she describes as "the largest community on the rez" - and her family had access to running water. But she remembers how, when she was a girl, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would travel to her family's home to shower and fill containers with water before returning to their own waterless homes. And she blames her grandmother's death from cancer on the scores of abandoned uranium mines that dot the Nation and pollute below ground water sources.

Those disparities contributed directly to the tragic losses suffered by the Navajo during the pandemic. Many residents travel great distances to find a grocery store or a place to buy other necessities, and when they would return to the reservation, the infection came with them. And with several generations of a family often sharing one small home, and a third of households living below the federal poverty level, Navajo Nation became a fertile breeding ground for COVID-19. Furthermore, in the months before a vaccine became available, the Navajo Nation lacked ready access to what was recommended as a principal deterrent to the spread of the illness. "When COVID came, what's the first thing they said?" asks Curt Ward. '"Wash your hands.' Well, when you don't have running water, that's tough to do."

A member and past president of the Rotary Club of Gilbert, Arizona, Ward is a relative newcomer to the Southwest. "I moved here from Iowa in 2014, and water poverty was a new thing to me," he says. Even before the pandemic, Ward had begun reading about the water problems in the Navajo Nation, and he was shocked to learn that while the average American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water per day, the average Navajo uses only seven. "And in some cases," Ward says, "it's less than that."

In 2016, members of the Rotary Club of Gilbert attended a water conference in Phoenix, and one of the presenters was DigDeep. Its representative explained the organization's work in the Navajo Nation, and how it was bringing water to the people living there.

DigDeep's method is ingeniously simple. It begins with an explanatory visit by DigDeep project managers to the home of the family it's assisting. The next morning, DigDeep delivers a 1,200-gallon cistern, which is then buried outside the home (so the water won't freeze). Technicians plumb a sink, water heater, filter, and drain line; where families don't have electricity, which is often the case, they install a solar panel, battery array, and electrical hookup to provide electricity to power the pump and lights. A tanker truck arrives and fills the cistern with clean water through an aboveground valve, and the homeowner receives training to operate, maintain, and repair the system, as well as a number to call should they encounter problems. All that unfolds over 24 hours.

The Gilbert Rotarians attending the DigDeep presentation learned another detail: each installation cost $4,500. Curt Ward explains what happened next: "Our members came back and said, 'What do you think? Could we raise 4,500 bucks and sponsor one of these tanks?'"

The answer was a resounding yes - and things took off from there. "I was just minding my own business, reading up on this stuff, when I got a call from a Rotarian in our district who attends an annual friendship conference with District 4185 in Mexico," Ward recalls. The caller said there was "quite a bit of interest" among members of the Mexican district in co-sponsoring a global grant to support the Navajo Water Project. If the Gilbert club could raise $30,000, he was confident the members of Rotary in Mexico would match it.

"That was beyond the scope of our small club," Ward says. "But we could go around to other clubs in Phoenix's East Valley, describe the project, and see if we could stir up interest." He also reached out to Jim Bissonett, a member of the Rotary E-Club of the Southwest and the district's Rotary Foundation chair.

In May 2018, the Rotary Club of Gilbert and its international partner in Mexico, the Rotary Club of San Andres Cholula, launched the first phase of Rotary's participation in the Navajo Water Project. Backed by a $78,000 global grant, they provided home water systems for 18 families - that's 64 individuals - near Thoreau. A year later, Whiting and the Sun Lakes club finally got their chance when they partnered with the Rotary Club of Brantford-Sunrise, Ontario, and completed a second phase; also set near Thoreau, it provided home water systems to 33 families - that's more than 100 individuals - with the support of a $144,000 global grant.

Read the complete story in the July 2022 issue of the Rotary Magazine.