Guest Post | TrueAfrica’s Barbara Luke Tells of Saving Lives With Clean Filtered Water

Guest author and volunteer Barbara Luke of TrueAfrica gives firsthand experiences of how water filters from Water For Life helped save lives  in Uganda.  Barbara and her husband Larry Luke have assisted Ugandan orphans with primary and secondary education, sanitation, food and housing assistance for over 10 years.  They are relentlessly loving humans who strive to better the lives of the impoverished on a daily basis. Barbara is the author of “Letters From Uganda” that appeared in the Utah newspaper The Deseret News in 2011.

Visiting several hundred children we help to support in Uganda, Africa through Child2Youth Foundation in 2010 was a very dramatic event in our lives.   Through a dedicated staff under the direction of Steven Ssenyonjo, we witnessed programs that benefit our students and their families in many villages in a 90 square mile area.

The one thing we saw that was hard to take was seeing the children fetching water from large mud puddles and contaminated springs where the animals come to drink and bath in etc.  We knew we had to attack this problem immediately as the water was making everyone sick and too many people, especially young children and babies, were dying because of the unhealthy water that was spreading bacteria and disease.

Doctor Larry Luke and I were thrilled to hear about the Sawyer Filter System that removes 99.99% of all dangerous bacteria from any water source.  When we saw how small, affordable and portable the filter system is we knew it was the answer to this huge universal problem.

We personally decided to take the filters directly to the villages where our sponsored children lived.   We brought enough filters with us to make sure their schools received some also.  That way the children, teachers and staff would be getting purified water at school and at home.

We donated two buckets to go with every filter and the teachers, parents and students could not believe how easy it was to put together.  I remember one man, upon seeing fresh, absolutely clear water for the first time in his life, said to me,  “ this is noting water, is it safe to drink? “  I took a glass, drank some of the water from his new bucket and said to him. “If I am alive tomorrow you will know that it is safe!”

The Sawyer filter saves the families so much time and expense since they don’t have to boil their water any longer and it produces hundreds of gallons of water a day so the water can be shared with all those around them.   The backwash syringe is very easy to use to clean out the filter so it will last for years, even with continual use.

We made sure we put a couple of Sawyer filters at our new Health Clinic so people could also obtain clean water while there were at the Clinic waiting to be seen by the nurses.  One man brought his baby over to show me how healthy she was because of the clean water.  He had lost two other children from contaminated water and he thanked us continually for over an hour for such a miracle that had come to their small corner of the world.  

While traveling to many different countries around the world we always take our Sawyer Filer with us so we never have to worry about getting ill from the different water sources we drink from.

Thanks Water For Life for helping us save hundreds of precious souls.

Dr. Larry Luke and Barbara Luke

Simi Valley, California