To join the global week of action please click here

If you are like me, you have watched the situation in Haiti, from a distance, and wondered if there was anything you could do. Abundant Water is developing a disaster response capability to assist communities that have experienced natural disasters to quickly produce their own clay pot filters to provide clean drinking water. Unfortunately we cannot do anything to directly assist after the recent earthquakes.

However, I have received this heartfelt plea through my extended family. The Haitian Development Fund is a small and lean organisation that operates a small medical clinic in Port – Au – Prince. In a great stroke of luck this clinic was largely spared during the recent earthquake and is now providing round the clock medical assistance. If you have a moment, please read the letter from co-founder Greg Richmond and make a contribution to their valuable work – I have.

Sunny

Friends,

Just hours ago I learned that my friend Dr. Moise Cely has survived the

earthquake in Haiti. Not only has Moise survived, but so has our

medical clinic in the Sarthe neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where he

has been treating hundreds of patients since the earthquake. This is

amazing news for which I am so thankful.

In 2001, after visiting the slums of Port-au-Prince with my friend Brent

DeLand, Brent and I and another colleague started a non-profit

organization called the Haitian Development Fund. Over the past nine

years, we have raised thousands of dollars, all of which has been used

to operate Dr. Moise’s clinic in a shanty town in Port-au-Prince. With

the support of good friends and foundations, we are the sole source of

support for this clinic.

When the earthquake hit Haiti this week, I immediately feared that the

clinic had collapsed. By Saturday morning, when we hadn’t heard from

Moise, I started to fear he hadn’t survived. But not only have the

clinic and Moise made it through the earthquake, our clinic has been one

of the few Port-au-Prince medical facilities that survived and continued

to treat patients. For this, we are extremely thankful.

I ask you to visit our website, www.hdfund.org, to learn more about our

work and to make a contribution to enable us to continue our work in

this time of unprecedented need.

Thank you so much.

Greg Richmond

NACSA

Happy New Year everyone!

Every now and again we are asked if volunteers can come and assist us here on the ground in Laos. I look forward to the day when I can say YES. We are working to have our training center up, running, and able to host volunteers but it will be a while before this is complete.

In the meanwhile I would like to recommend the Vang Vieng Organic Farm as a great place to stay and volunteer for a while. I have been there dozens of times and have really enjoyed working on their mudbrick house building projects. Anyone who enjoys cooking might be glad to hear that they have just completed the kitchen of Peter’s mud house. It now has an earth PIZZA OVEN!. The video above was taken a few years ago when they were first making the bulk of the mudbricks.

For details of the farm or mudbrick house building projects please follow these links:

http://www.laofarm.org/

http://earthbricker.wordpress.com/

Take care

Fremma is a Ugandan monk and friend of Sunny’s at The Peace Revolution Temple in Bangkok. Sunny and Fremma are working together trying to arrange a water project in Uganda.

We are in the middle of Mozilla Service Week. So far we have been approached by a Romanian student and I have had a very helpful Skype chat with social media coach Janet Fouts.

For anyone out there who is wanting to give some of their time and expertise to a worthy cause here are a list of short concrete tasks that will help us immensely:

• Help SEO our blog;

• Help with WordPress plugins;

• Does everybody follow you on twitter? Wanna get the word out about our next twitter chat about clean drinking water?

• Do you facebook? We could use some help with the content on the fan page;

• Do you know of any good places we could post our video to get some more views?

• Do you really know WordPress? We would like to make changes to this template.

Please email us at projects@abundantwater.org if this interests you.

Do you want to help us build a brand new abundantwater.org? We’re asking our community to see who is interested in giving feedback on, and testing new features that we’re developing.

We are participating in the Mozilla service week (http://mozillaservice.org). Mozilla is looking for passionate internet tech’s to support non profit community service organizations. We are participating and are currently looking at what we can get help with for the week from the 14^th to the 21^st of September.

We would like you to tell us how our website can better serve you. How can we improve the website to make it easier for you to be an active part of our community?

There are plenty of ways you can be involved and make your voice heard. If you have a suggestion of improvements we can make to the website please email us at: projects@abundantwater.org

This is your site. We want to hear from you!