“Jerrycans mean life for us”
Unable to drink from the contaminated waters of the Artibonite River, Wilna and her children were without drinking water for four days.
"The jerrycan was a gift for us because without it, we would be dead,” Wilna said. “The jerrycans mean life for us and we thank Operation Blessing for them."
LUBEN, Haiti - When Wilna was a young girl, she watched helplessly as Hurricane George flooded her village and destroyed their simply mud-and-straw homes. Twelve years later, she’s facing another deadly crisis that has once again left her helpless and threatened the lives of her family and two young children.
Wilna remembers the exact day that cholera arrived to her village.
“On October 19, the water became bad,” she said.
As people in her village began to get sick, they received warnings via radio transmissions to not drink from the river. But the river was their life source—the place where they bathed, cleaned clothes, and collected water for cooking and drinking.
The local pastor of the village, Pastor Bo, tried to warn the villagers as well, but not before cholera had claimed its first victims.
“This is the only life they know,” he said. “They always come to the river. But when people started to die, they began to listen.”
Of the 1,500 people who call Luben home, 500 became sick with cholera. Two hundred people died—and more than half of those deaths were children. So Wilna had good reason to be afraid for her own life and that of her two children, Nastalie, 5, and Edna, 2.
She heeded the warnings not to drink the water, but she faced another critical dilemma. Heavy rains had flooded the river and the rice fields surrounding their village, essentially cutting them off from any relief.
For four days, Wilna and the village of Luben were without drinking water. Unable to care for her children, a desperate mother cried out to God for help.
“My children would ask me, ‘Mama, Mama, give me some water,’ and I didn’t have anything to give,” she said. “I didn’t sleep for four days and prayed for God to protect my children.”
The very next day, Wilna’s prayers were answered. An Operation Blessing truck loaded with Lifesaver jerrycans arrived just beyond the flooded fields that surrounded their village.
“We didn’t believe the pastor when he said that help was coming, but then we saw the truck and began walking through mud and water to reach it,” Wilna said.
Like the Biblical mass exodus from Egypt, the villagers crossed the fields in waist-deep water to collect their jerrycans that would provide them with purified drinking water and ultimately, give them life.
“The jerrycan was a gift for us because without it, we would be dead,” Wilna said. “The jerrycans mean life for us and we thank Operation Blessing for them.
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