Would You Drink a Glass of Dirty Water?

A Desperate Choice

When Eh Paw and her family moved to a remote village in Myanmar, one of the first things they did was to look for clean drinking water. “Here the water was full of rubbish and people used it as a toilet,” Eh Paw told CBN. So they looked for other water sources and found a muddy pond in a rice field. Eight-year-old Angel told us about the water there. “I saw that the water was yellow and smelled like mud,” she said. “I didn’t want to drink it either.”

Eh Paw had to make a choice: the stream or the pond. In the end, they chose the pond.

“The pond water has clay in it. When I cook white rice, it turns yellow,” said Eh Paw.

Eh Paw tried to strain and boil the pond water before the kids drank it, but even that has not protected them. They sometimes got very sick. “I’d heard some people from the village died last year after drinking the water,” she recalled. Then Angel got a high fever and was vomiting. She couldn’t even open her eyes. “I was so scared she would die that I rushed her to a clinic eight miles away. Thank God, she recovered!”

When Operation Blessing learned about the polluted pond and the stream, we dug a well for the entire community. “The day we got water from the new well was one of the happiest of my life! The water is so clean, and it tastes so good!” declared Angel.

Now, Eh Paw doesn’t worry about her daughters getting sick, and everyone is glad to have cool, clean water.

“The water is so pure and clear – and it has no smell! Thank you for our new well!” said Angel with a smile.

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