Healing Waters: Jeff and Wendy Dean's Guatemalan Adventure

A shot of Jeff and Wendy from Healing Waters

Follow Jeff and Wendy Dean, real-estate broker and youth pastor from Denver, as they head to Guatemala to participate in a service project for international water organization "Healing Waters". Their film chronicles their reflections of four days dispensing free water to impoverished Guatemalan communities, and sheds light on how "Healing Waters" works to alleviate the problems associated with dirty drinking water in third world countries by involving churches in community solution-making.

Wendy: We passed out about a hundred bottles, and flyers, to let the community know about tomorrow’s event for the free water. It was fun. They were all very excited to get the water, you could tell on their faces.

Bottle Sterilization

Jeff: We pulled up about 10 o’clock this morning and things were already under way. There were probably 60 or 70 people in the church getting spoken to by a woman from the department of health that represents this part of Guatemala, so she was just telling them about how to keep the ‘garrafones’ (five gallon jugs) clean, and just basic sanitation...The pastor is not going to receive one penny of profit from this. In fact, the revenue that the church generates from this, all needs to go back to the community.

Wendy: Healing Waters’ philosophy is that everyone can get water, not just people who come to the church, or who are Christian, or people who serve the church.

Wendy: We’re filling up the bottles, the ‘garrafones,’ that people received yesterday, and some of them brought some from home as well.

Jeff: Healing Waters' has got this down to such a system; it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen. On the surface it looks so easy, but when you...look at all the complications, it’s incredible. To see the dollars that have been donated, physically be working, makes me more excited about donating.

Jeff: When we handed out a jug of water, and the person said ‘thank you’, it wasn’t just the casual ‘thanks’ that we would say to a waiter at a restaurant. It was just a ‘thank you’ of the type I’ve never received before.

Jeff:Healing Waters doesn’t try to spread itself so thin that it tries to do it all. It just focuses on the basic human need of water, and does it really well. What comes out of that is a healthier work force, people who don’t miss work as often because they’re too sick to get out of bed. What comes out of that are children that are well enough to go to school, every day.