Pure Water Project - Cesar Harada

< Pure water project

The 26th of december 2004, the tsunami devastated coastal regions of south-east Asia. A swiss friend of mine was attending a yoga class in Auroville at that time, she mailed everyone to explain the situation. A few hours after the catastrophy, a comitee of emmergency was organised localy to cope with the situation, listing the problems and finding solutions. One of the main problem they picked, which is a latent weakness of this region was the water : the tsunami made all the water undrinkable. It would have taken days for the national and international help to reach them : they needed a water purificating machine and a local solution existed. They had to find very quickly enough money to buy the machine, so they opened a bank account and spread the new, you know, one of these chain-mail that is usually filtered and ends up automatically in the trash bin ... I received the mail in Paris. At that time I was (and still am) a broke student, and I had the feeling they wouldn't raise enough funds with this chain mail ... instead of giving money i didn't have, I would help them collecting, work with them : I bought the domain "purewaterproject.org" and took the initative to design a website within a few hours hosted illegaly on my school server.
	The website was very simple : a main page explaining the project with the bank accounts details at the bottom. The initators and main communicators on this project were Mita Radhakrishnan and Tapas Desrousseaux, both linguistic researchers living in Auroville, so together we made a multilingual website.
	The website had a lot of pictures of the places where the pumps would be installed.
	The situation was terrible, people were getting ill and died drinking contamined water.
	A local health report page was written by Doctor Beena.
	Each donor would have his name listed on the website.
	The donors and the victims were able to leave comments.
	The local internet network being seriously damaged by the tsunami, it was very important that the website was hosted remotely, in France. This website was also a page where links to disappeared people and international announcements of NGO's were relayed, ourselves being a very small local initiative.
	A "NEWS" page was there for the internal communication of the project for coordinators and donators.
	The operation was very difficult but finally successfull. The cast system was difficult to overpass, equity had always been a complicated enterprise.
"I came to know CESAR HARADA in end-December 2004, immediately after the tsunami that hit my region. We had just started a program to install purified dynamised drinking water machines in the coastal villages so that our tsunami intervention could have a long-term impact. Provision of clean drinking water was an urgent need. Cesar received the SOS email through a worldwide network of friends and responded immediately. He not only made a donation for the project, but more important, set up a fully functioning website within just a day or two. He hosted it, and created it from scratch, based on information he got from us. It was exactly what was needed, and he did it without even asking; it was completely his idea. That website turned out to be crucially important in communicating the daily developments and being a meeting point for concerned people around the globe to express their support. Today, this Pure Water Project provides some 55000 litres of pure drinking water per day to tsunami-affected people. It rallied together hundreds of individual small donors from Europe and the USA, (for a total of nearly 93,500 USD) and is an example in the region. The website that Cesar created and maintained for one full year, was crucial in this worldwide collaboration. One year later, Cesar handed over the site to our control, making sure the transition was smooth. Two years later, Cesar’s role continues to be one of wholehearted support." Mita Radakrishnan. http://www.purewaterproject.in new version of the website re-designed and hosted by the Auroville Language Lab http://www.aurovillelanguagelab.org Auroville Language Lab