Imagine a life without water in your home. Instead of turning on a tap, you’d have to make regular trips to the nearest water source — possibly contaminated with disease-carrying organisms — just to get through the day. Alisa Van Dyke made such a trek for this video from Healing Hands International in honor of World Water Day, an annual observance that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Van Dyke, Healing Hands’ marketing director, walked to a creek near her home and filled a container with muddy brown water. You can see what she did with it in the video. The images are a bit disturbing. (She assures me that her infant son didn’t drink any of the muddy water.)

Disaster relief organizations associated with Churches of Christ are preparing to respond to the powerful earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed an estimated 1,300 people. Healing Hands International is accepting donations for Japan relief. WFR Relief Ministries of the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, La., also is exploring how Christians can serve the people of Japan. Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City reports that eight long-term exchange students from Ibaraki Christian University had planned to return home Saturday.

Roberta Edwards, who oversees the Son Light Children’s Home ministry in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was named “Woman of Hope” for 2011 at the annual Women of Hope conference in Nashville, Tenn. Nearly 400 women, representing 75 churches in 17 U.S. states, attended the conference, hosted by Healing Hands International.

New on The Christian Chronicle’s website, an extended report on Churches of Christ in Haiti, one year after the devastating, 7.0-magnitude earthquake. The video is from Son Light Children’s Home in Port-au-Prince, which I first visited in February 2010. A wall at the home fell during the quake, killing a 15-year-old boy named Nicky. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to visit the home — and it’s overseer, Roberta Edwards — a year after the quake. I also learned about the downside of American aid to Haiti.

I’m back nearly a year after my first visit here in February 2010. I am covering Churches of Christ and their ministries as the one-year anniversary of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake approaches. Right now I’m sitting on the veranda of a nice hotel full of aid workers and folks with non-governmental organizations. Across the street, there’s a tent city.

WSMV channel 4 news in Nashville, Tenn., ran a brief feature on the Haiti relief work of Nashville-based Healing Hands International.
Watch the video.
I am scheduled to be in Haiti later this week to see some of Healing Hands’ work in person. I will be following up on stories we published about Haiti in 2010:
Online exclusives from January 2010:
Quake claims up to 150 from one Haitian church
Churches send doctors, medicine, food to Haiti
Ministries collecting funds for Haiti relief
February/March 2010 issue:
‘Each one of us has lost someone in Haiti’ (report from Haitian …

Even before the earthquake, UNICEF estimates there were 380,000 orphans in Haiti. Now, relief officials can only guess at the total. An untold number of children lost their parents in the quake. Others were simply abandoned by families who could no longer care for them.Harry Hames knows all too well the desperation in Haiti. Moved by what he saw happening in the country, he retired from his job and joined Healing Hands International. He’s now the agency’s director of operations for Haiti.

Getting the story was a bit of a challenge. Some of the co-op members didn’t speak French, Burkina Faso’s official language, or even Dagara. So one of the co-op members had to translate from the local language into French for Chad, who then translated from French to English for me and Deon.