I attended a Rotary meeting in Lowell, MI yesterday, as a guest of my good friend and colleague, Dr. Jim Lang.

I visited this well last October (top picture) to learn that it was broken, and people in the village were walking 4-5 miles round trip to fetch water from a spring down in a ravine (which means they had to walk UP the ravine with their full 5-gallon buckets of water).

Another thing on my to-do list in Haiti last week was to visit with the families in whose homes we placed biosand water filters last October.

We took the first baby step this past week in our vision to plant trees and banana plants on the sun-parched island of La Gonave.

I love little kids who wear glasses. I don't know why, necessarily, but kids in glasses just have this endearing look. I met this young school boy up in the mountain village of Fontina a few days ago.

I stopped by this little boy's cot at the cholera field hospital last week. His little body was fighting to survive this quick and terrible illness.

I have enjoyed moving about the island of La Gonave for the past few days, visiting several of her beautiful villages that I've not been to in the past.

Spent the morning with a development worker (a water systems engineer) seeing how they are bringing water to the community they're working in.

Still on Haiti's mainland. I attended a three hour long (yikes!) village development meeting this afternoon, listening to the people that live there (71 households) work out the details of maintaining the well that would go into operation in their village (i.e., hours it would be open, what wage to pay the well guard, how much to charge for water, etc.).

Spent the entire day on Haiti's mainland today, meeting with people a lot smarter than me when it comes to doing development work here.