Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408150057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MELISSA CURTIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The children were plagued with stomach troubles, diarrhea and dysentery. Contaminated water caused their illnesses; the family's drinking water came from a spring running through a cow pasture.
"The children were young and their systems were not immune from the contaminants yet," said Stinson, the project's director of facility development.
Then the Virginia Water Project built a community well nearby that provided safe drinking water for the family, and Stinson saw the children's health greatly improve.
"It really made me feel good," she said.
Dealing with these kinds of conditions is nothing new for Stinson. She grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, spent her early years fearing the creatures that might be lurking behind the outhouse door and lugged buckets of water from the family's well into the house.
Stinson has seen the water project grow from a fledgling program with little funding to an agency with a seven-state scope, from Delaware to Florida, that has helped bring safe water and sewer systems to more than 300,000 households -108,000 of them in Virginia.
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the Virginia Water Project began in Roanoke in 1969 as the Demonstration Water Project, with the goal of bringing safe drinking water to low-income rural residents of the Roanoke Valley.
Today the private, nonprofit agency's 23 employees help provide water and waste-water systems to an average of 160 communities in Virginia a year. Located in downtown Roanoke, the organization's annual budget has grown to $2.2 million. Funding comes from federal, state and private sources.
The Virginia Water Project will spend up to $1,600 to help connect a single home to water and waste-water systems. In addition, the project provides communities with low-interest loans of $1,000 to $100,000 toward installing these systems.
Project officials also help localities apply for loans and grants from local and state programs, as well as from private foundations, in order to obtain the remaining funds that are needed to complete a project.
Barry Woodford, an engineering consultant working in conjunction with the Virginia Water Project in a community in Bedford County, said the state is more willing to give grants to projects that are getting money from other sources.
"Without Virginia Water Project's money, we probably would not have gotten the state's grant for the project," Woodford said.
Individual and community applicants for Virginia Water Project's help, which number about 250 a year, are judged according to need. Only low-income individuals living in rural communities are considered.
The conditions of these communities' water supplies are primitive. It's not unusual for outhouses or garbage dumps to contaminate the ground water that flows into shallow wells that provide drinking water for families. Septic tanks often seep into creeks where people collect water.
Cisterns, or tanks, catch rainfall- as well as bird droppings, dead insects and rotting leaves. Residents then use the water for drinking, cooking, cleaning or washing.
Dennis Burdette's daily life consists of these kinds of Third World conditions. Burdette, 37, lives near Moneta in Bedford County in a four-room house that has no indoor plumbing.
When Burdette wants a glass of water or needs to wash his hands, he has to carry a bucket of rust-colored water into his home from the spigot in his back yard.
When nature calls, Burdette has to trek to his outhouse, made of plywood and overgrown with weeds and insects, situated on the back of his family-owned property.
For Burdette, sinks, toilets and showers are modern conveniences he thought he would never own.
But in a matter of months, with the help of Virginia Water Project and other grant money, Burdette's ramshackle house and 11 like it in the Hendrick's Store community will have what most Americans think of as basic necessities. Septic tanks and wells will be put in, and indoor plumbing will be installed.
Hendrick's Store, known to the locals as Chigger Ridge or The Ridge, is one of about 225 communities in Virginia that the Virginia Water Project is helping.
In addition to helping bring water and sewer systems to communities, the agency also helps communities with systems that are out of compliance with state standards by training operators, providing technical assistance and making repairs to the systems.
The Virginia Water Project, however, is not just about water.
It's about helping people to help themselves and their communities.
One program, Mobilizing Resources for Rural Change, was developed this year to teach citizens how to address problems in their communities and work together to solve them.
Sioux Miles, the program's director, said workshops are set up to teach community members basic decision-making and communication skills, as well as how to resolve conflicts, run a town meeting and make effective presentations.
Miles said the workshops are designed to help people learn from experience. Participants are divided into groups and assigned tasks. The groups must work together to formulate and follow a plan of action to complete the task. Later, they discuss how effective their performances were.
"They're learning from doing, not from listening to lectures," Miles said.
Although the programs are brought to communities with water and waste-water issues, the skills taught are intended to be carried over into other aspects of community life.
"We try to leave a process [the community] can use for any problem that comes up," said Winford Brown, the program's training coordinator.
Volunteers for Communities is a program the Virginia Water Project adopted in 1993 that trains communities to plan and run a volunteer program for high-school- and college-age students.
The students live and work in a community, providing labor for all kinds of projects including painting, installing bathrooms, building parks, cleaning up trash or tutoring children and adults.
Maxine Waller, the program's director, said that since the program came under the wing of the Virginia Water Project, 289 students have volunteered in nine communities in Virginia, including Landsdowne Park, a public housing project in Roanoke.
"The students and communities work side by side ...," she said. "It's an exchange that works out really well."
And once all the programs and the construction have been completed, something more than just shiny new porcelain toilets and freshly painted fences are left behind.
Something called pride.
"Once families receive water and sewer systems, they start to fix up their entire house. They begin to take pride in where they're living," said Mary Terry, the executive director of the Virginia Water Project.
Terry says she has seen entire communities transformed. People start painting their homes, cleaning up trash and planting flowers.
Take, for instance, a small community within sight of Hollins College in Roanoke and Botetourt counties. Six years ago, the neighborhood of about 80 homes was slowly deteriorating.
The younger generation was moving away. Homes were falling apart. The 4-inch water mains, which lacked any fire protection for the community, provided foul-smelling, polluted water that needed to be treated for drinking. If four or five residents turned on their water at once, only a trickle would come out. Septic tanks constantly overflowed.
Then in 1987, the Virginia Water Project took part in a $3.5 million community rehabilitation project that brought water and sewer systems to the community, as well as extensive repair work to the houses.
Now it's a different place to live. People are maintaining their homes. Families are building houses and moving in.
"They really cleaned up their act and just changed the whole community," Stinson said. "When the kids grew up there, they wanted to move out. Now they want to come back."
Wendall Bruce, who has lived in the community all his life, said the changes mean a lot to him, not only because his water tastes much better or because he was able to install a washer and dryer, but also because of what it means for his family.
"That's one of the best pleasures I have - to think that my grandchild will be able to stay in the community," said Bruce, 43, who shares his home with his wife, daughter and granddaughter.
Although the Virginia Water Project has made great strides in reducing the number of state households without indoor plumbing, nearly 150,000 Virginians are living without safe drinking water, according to the project's annual report. Forty-five other states are doing better in providing this basic necessity.
Virginia Water Project hopes to change that. Stinson says the project's goal is to supply potable water to every Virginian by the year 2000.
Stinson, however, is skeptical.
"There is a lack of funds. Unless we get more money, I don't see how we can achieve that goal," she said. "The state really needs to come up with more money."
This year the state gave the Virginia Water Project $600,000.
To plan for the future, the Virginia Water Project's 25th anniversary Water Is Life Conference will be held Wednesday through Friday in Roanoke.
"We'll really look at where we've come over the past 25 years and look at what's left to be done," Terry said.
And though there is much left to be done, the accomplishments of the project have long surpassed Stinson's expectations. The initial main goal of providing healthy drinking water to communities is only one of the benefits achieved.
"It adds to the people's self-esteem and morale," Stinson said. "It gives them a whole new outlook on life.
The 25th anniversary Water Is Life Conference is open to the public and will be held at the Roanoke Airport Marriott. For more information, call (703) 345-1184.
by CNB