Each morning, children of the Belen district of Iquitos, Peru, come to the river to fill their pans and jugs with water for their families’ daily needs. Tributaries of the Amazon, the Nanay and Itaya rivers are home to countless indigenous peoples displaced by illegal gold mining, logging, and agricultural operations encroaching on the rainforests. Families forced from the jungle that provided the wild game and medicinal flora they relied upon for centuries, now live in stilt-raised homes on the rivers’ flood plains. They drink, bathe, wash their clothing, and defecate in the same water that supplies their main source of protein, fish contaminated with mercury by miners dredging the rivers. Desperate families—42% of the populace faces extreme poverty—unable to feed or care for their young, abandon children as young as 3 yo to the streets. 57% of residents lack safe drinking water; 20% of children lack birth certificates or identification documents.
Thanks to Westminster’s generosity and support, members of WPC’s Living Waters for the World team, Beth and Jim Felch, Ruth Ann and Bobby Veach, Carson Salyer and Doug Leins, leave tomorrow for a week in Iquitos. Your donations have supplied a new Reverse Osmosis water filtration system for ABBA House Rumococha—a home for older abandoned boys, located on the Nanay River—and a necessary rebuild of an Ultraviolet filtration system first installed by WPC in 2011 at Puerto Alegria on the Itaya River, home to younger boys. ABBA House is a faith-based, Christian non-profit organization focusing on providing a loving home, education, and care for abandoned and orphaned boys. As more daughters are abandoned to the streets of Iquitos, ABBA House hopes to provide similar housing and care for girls. And as ABBA House becomes proficient in the production of pure water, the boys’ home will provide a pipeline and spigot to the public, and provide and/or sterilize their containers before drawing the pure water provided by the filtration systems you have provided
Please keep our team in prayer as they work and celebrate, work side by side with ABBA House and educate ABBA House staff and children in the need for and proper use of pure water! Thanks, Westminster! This couldn’t happen without you!
