Yellow Quill treatment plant role model for China

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The innovative technology that has given residents of the Yellow Quill First Nation clean drinking water again after eight long years of having to boil their water may soon find its way to Yunnan, China.

Dr. Derek Chitwood is the technical director of Partners in Hope, a non-profit organization that provides assistance and expertise to rural development projects in the poverty stricken areas of the Yunnan province. Originally from Fresno, Calif., Chitwood, an environmental engineer, has been working with community leaders in Yunnan to find ways to improve water quality in the region. For the past three-and-a-half years, Chitwood has been dividing his time between Fresno and Honghe, a town located 24 km north of the Vietnam border.

Chitwood met Dr. Hans Peterson, the man who helped develop the new water treatment system now used on Yellow Quill, during an international conference on water safety. Now Chitwood hopes to use the same technology to one day make clean drinking water a reality in the remote villages of China as well.

The Yellow Quill water treatment plant uses micro-organisms that eat away contaminants like E. coli that make their way into the community's water supply.

Because this method doesn't cost a lot of money, this type of biotechnology is very well suited to the poor villages of Yunnan, Chitwood said.

"What I'd like to do is just to start off small. Choose a village and install something like the Yellow Quill water drinking system and show them the difference that they could have ... if it really does improve people's health, which improves their income and helps them develop quicker, then I think I've proved myself."

Finding out just how many people are getting sick because of the poor water quality is another challenge that Chitwood continues to face.

"It's very difficult to get the information about the health and I can understand why the government might not give that to a foreigner ... so we don't really know what the health problems are or health statistics ... other than what we observe personally," he said.

"Going in, we knew that their infant mortality rate is very high and we knew that they, from speaking with people, had very high levels of disease, especially diarrhea and dysentery. And so that was some of my motivation. I went and sampled the water and found that 94 per cent of the water that we sampled had E. coli in it, which is an indicator that there's fecal contamination. That's when I met Hans and we talked about the possibilities of using Yellow Quill as a role model for us."

As a foreigner, Chitwood said he understands why there may be some resistance on the part of the local population to accept his ideas.

"Sometimes, a new guy comes in and he wants to change around things and that may be good. Unless there's that trust built up, how do you know this guy is bringing something good? So far, I've had a lot of people who've told me 'Well, the water's fine. We don't have a problem with it.' Part of that is they just don't know. They're not educated to know the difference between what could be if they had clean water and what they've got."

So far, plans to construct a water treatment facility similar to Yellow Quill's are still in the infancy stage. Chitwood said once he is able to build more solid relationships with community leaders and academics who are respected by government officials, he hopes to eventually build plants in three different locations, each with its own unique water problems.

"One (area) is just strictly a biological problem, where there's a lot of E. coli. Another place has a very high area fluoride concentration and another place has a very high arsenic concentration," he said.

In the end, Chitwood said the goal of Partners in Hope is to provide Yunnan residents with the skill and knowledge to take control of their own communities.

"Our philosophy is to live among the people and set a role model ... work among the and learn from them as opposed to just the white knight coming in and telling them how to do it right ... start with what they know, build upon what they have and then in the end, the goal really is that they'll take ownership of everything. In the end they'll say 'Wow, we just did this by ourselves.'"