Until a person is able to make a mission trip to St. Suzanne or a neighboring village, it is almost impossible to describe what daily life is like where there is no ready access to water, where what water there exists is likely to be polluted and where everything becomes dark at sundown because there is no public sources of electricity. As someone back from a mission put it, "going to Haiti is like travelling back in a time machine to the dark ages". One teen expressed well when, one day walking down the rutted road, they remarked, "the romans had a better lifestyle and they lived 2000 years ago." HBHH is working diligently to address the critical problem of bringing clean water to these villages as well as working towards sources of electricity.
At the end of 2005, St. Suzanne - a village of five thousand people - had no working wells. While the villagers could wash their clothes in the polluted brook that flowed through the village, the closest source of water was a twenty minute walk out of the village. Unfortunately, that water was also polluted and there was no effective means of purifying it. Some villagers put small quantities of bleach in the water to kill the germs while others did nothing at all.
During the Spring of 2006, HBHH raised the money to drill three wells in the village. Because St. Suzanne is in the mountains and the roads are extremely poor, the drilling rigs appropriate for penetrating the rock formations under the ground have not been able to reach the village.
Each well cost aproximately $4,000 to drill. But this cost is small in comparison to how life is changed having clean water available.
Despite that handicap, the three wells drilled by a lighter drilling rig have produced water.
Another possible source of clean drinking water may be the construction of cisterns. HBHH has identified the roof of the elementary school as being capable of collecting large amounts of rain water. Since that roof badly needs replacement, the time is right to not only replace that roof but to incorporate a water collection system and cistern capacity into that work. Of course, this all takes money, but at least a promising solution to a critical health problem has been found.
Electricity is also lacking in the village and to an even greater extent thatn drinking water. There is no common source of power and the number of private generators or solar panels is no more than a handful for the thousands of people in the village. While not the pressing health issue that clean drinking water presents, lack of power is a health issue in its own right because the medical clinic can not perform any diagnostic tests without electricity.