By Kellie McIntyre
Clean water is something most of us take for granted.
In fact, according to U.S News & World Report, Alabama’s drinking water quality ranks number four in the nation. Our clean water is so abundant that in addition to cooking and personal hygiene, we also use it to water our lawns and wash our cars. Such use of a life-sustaining resource is unthinkable in many parts of the world. Especially Tanzania.
In countries like Tanzania, a child dies every 90 seconds due to diseases caused by unsafe water. That’s not a statistic. That’s a tragedy.
Having seen the water crisis firsthand from visits to Tanzania over the years, Executive Pastor of Mountaintop Church Wayne Hudson along with Tom Willingham, Clayton Davie, Dr. Kay Honea, Dr. Tim Thompson and other church members decided to act.
As a retired Brookwood Hospital infertility specialist, Dr. Honea spent her career utilizing modern medicine to bring life into this world. To see lives lost due to something as basic as access to clean water was difficult to accept. “It was discouraging, Honea says. “All the sickness and death from unclean water. We were treating the same illnesses over and over. Rather than treating diseases like dysentery, cholera and typhoid, it would be so much more effective if we could prevent them from occurring in the first place.”
That was the first drop in the bucket for a new humanitarian initiative.
Prior to Hudson’s second-half career as a pastor, he was an engineer and spent 30 years with Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., retiring as VP of Sales. Meanwhile, Willingham had retired as VP of Operations at Protective Life. What do you get when you pair an engineer and an operations executive? You get solutions.
Working together, Hudson and Willingham founded Safe Water Africa (SWA), an NGO with a mission to bring clean water and the “living water” of the gospel to the people of Tanzania. “After seeing what we saw, we knew we had to do something,” says Hudson, now President of Safe Water Africa.
The SWA formula is simple and successful—SWA partners with local churches, organizations and individuals to raise funds to purchase chlorinating equipment and fund the installations. This equipment miraculously turns dirty water into clean water with nothing more than a car battery and table salt.
Over the past 15 years, this small non-profit has brought clean water to 100 communities across Tanzania’s 26 provinces.
SWA’s project manager in Tanzania is Joel Rugano, who initially moved to Alabama to attend Birmingham-Easonian Baptist Bible College. During his time in the Magic City, Rugano became friends with the SWA team, and after graduating, he returned to Tanzania to begin his pastoral work. Rugano now identifies rural churches in communities that need clean water and manages the installation of the chlorination systems.
After installing the system at a church in Lindi, Tanzania, Pastor Mohamed Chigogolo said, “With my heart full of joy…we now have access to clean water that is essential to health, hygiene and well-being. It is a fundamental human right.” For more information, visit safewaterafrica.com
