Why is clean water missing in the world? And why did Mediassociates help?

Donating to clean water seems like such a simple thing, perhaps almost inconsequential. At least, that’s what many believe until they see the issue with their own eyes.

As Mediassociates began its work with World Vision to help villagers in Honduras install a clean water pumping system, agency team members traveled to Pueblo Viejo there and took the walk that their little girls and young women did every day—down a treacherous dirt path, nearly a mile down a mountainside, to a muddy brook. Water trickled past tree roots into a shallow pool. Villagers had carved a pit about 4 feet square, marked with a stake, in which water gathered … to be scooped into buckets and carried a mile back up the mountain. “We didn’t really understand the reality of the problem until we saw this ourselves,” says Ben Kunz, Mediassociates’ head of strategy. “And when we saw what people had to do, to get this muddy water just to survive, we all got a little emotional.”

An estimated 703 million people around the world today still have no clean water, and the problem is especially acute in the mountainous country of Honduras. There, approximately 80% of the land is steep hills and craggy cliffs—fertile ground for growing coffee, but with porous rock underneath that makes getting water difficult. Unlike in the United States, where the “water table” of pooling aquifers often can be tapped by digging a vertical well just 20 or 30 feet beneath a field, in Honduras water is often buried far below or sourced far above mountainside villages.

For centuries, people have solved this problem there with their feet, often walking miles downhill to gather the water they need.

Tracy Brunjes recalls the moment she and Scott decided they would sponsor a village. It was their first trip to Honduras in 2017, led by a team from World Vision to explore communities that might need help. They drove to Pueblo Viejo in gigantic SUVs, traversing rugged, narrow mountain dirt roads, and upon arriving on a narrow downhill shelf a cloudburst turned the road above them into waves of mud. Water was suddenly everywhere, surging, flowing, ironic given how its typical absence was the reason the Brunjes were visiting.

Was this a sign?

“The people were so grateful we were there to help,” Tracy Brunjes recalls. “They came out, men and women and even old ladies, with ropes to try to pull our trucks out of the mudslide.” But the SUVs were stuck. The Brunjes grabbed the twine and branches held out by their new friends at the top of an embankment, and with shoes squelching in the mud, they hiked miles out to the main road.

Witnessing how happy the villagers were to help them, Scott and Tracy Brunjes decided they would give back. It was providential

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Learn more about this project at www.mediassociatesvillageproject.com.