Running Water for Platon?

One of our most exciting days this trip was the day we were in Platon to do medical clinics.  In addition to the medical clinics we had another project to investigate.  Way back 3 months ago, Paul, Amoce and I went up to Platon to have a meeting with the community there.  We like to take the opportunity to listen to what a community has to say.  We asked them what their biggest problems were.  One that rose to the top was having sufficient water.  The discussion about water went on for a long time.  They told us there were two springs (sous) that ran all year long.  One was far away (4 hour walk), the other closer (15 minute walk).  So after that meeting Paul got to thinking, and decided that he needed to go see the sous when we were back in Haiti. He and Enrique left early in the morning with Vilbon Dominique, a member of the committee and Yanie's father, to walk to the closest sous.  They were gone for several hours.  Paul returned with incredible pictures of beautiful mountains, women walking up the mountain carrying water, and women doing their laundry together in the pool formed by the spring. He also came back saying he couldn't believe how steep the climb was and how difficult it was to get to the place.  They had already poured a concrete cistern a long while ago, but never used it and it wouldn't hold water now anyway.  They also had poured a pad for a generator far down the other side of the mountain near where the spring is.  The idea was to pump water up the mountain to the cistern and then let it be gravity fed to two communities down the mountain.  It was impressive to think they'd been able to manage to build those structures. On the way back down to Platon he also learned that there are 70 houses in the mountains in the area that have rain-water collection cisterns, but most of them are no longer functioning because the metal roofing is too badly corroded.  Paul was told that the water that used to collect in those cisterns was meant for community use and was shared by everyone. After we came back to Massachusetts, Paul kept thinking about the feasibility of delivering that water to a community.  He's continuing to investigate options and has had one meeting with an engineer he works with.  There are lots of challenges, but it will be an interesting project if we can figure out how to make it work.