Ken Puzey remembers the cries of a young Haitian girl at a medical clinic where he was volunteering last April.
Puzey, 47, is an electrical engineer and founder of QuantaSpec in Burlington, which has conducted extensive research on federally funded projects to develop detection devices for IEDs and other chemical and biological threats. In another ongoing project, he researched a way to identify quickly and easily malaria in blood samples. Puzey traveled to Haiti on a mission for Essex Alliance Church, where he is a member.
"A couple of little girls that came in had these parasitic worms that were in their legs, eating their flesh, and I could hear one of them screaming in the next room as these nurses pushed and pulled these worms out from her leg," Puzey said. "And it was really difficult to hear that."
One of the girls, Puzey said, had multiple worms in both legs.
"That girl never cried out; she just bit her lip," Puzey said. "Tears were coming down her face like a river. She was in a lot of pain."
After two hours, the nurses stopped, unable to get all of the worms out of the girl's legs and unwilling to inflict any more pain. They bandaged her legs and asked her to come back the next day, but she never did.
"I knew that all this suffering I was seeing was the result of not having access to safe drinking water, so when I came back in April, I started working on prototypes of a solar water boiler," Puzey said.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates there are 780 million people worldwide without access to safe drinking water. Every year, the CDC says, diarrheal diseases, such as cholera, kill 801,000 young children — more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Diarrheal disease is the second-leading cause of death among children younger than 5, and 88 percent of those deaths are attributable to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and insufficient hygiene.
Unsafe water also spreads diseases such as schistosomiasis and guinea worm, parasitic worms such as those afflicting the young girls in Haiti.
"There are 116 million people on the planet with high-intensity helminth infections, a genus name for parasitic worms," Puzey said.
No chlorine required
The solar water boiler Puzey developed, which he demonstrated in QuantaSpec's offices at the south end of Battery Street, is remarkably simple. It consists of a glass vacuum tube, lined with copper, that holds about 22 ounces of water.
The tube, which is an off-the-shelf part used in solar hot water heaters and made in China, is mounted on a curved piece of stainless steel that serves to collect and concentrate the sun's rays onto the tube. In the tropics of Haiti, for instance, or Kenya, it takes about 45 minutes to boil the water, purifying it.
Because of the vacuum insulating the double-walled tube, the outside of the tube remains cool to the touch, meaning the boiling water can be emptied into a safe container that will keep it from being re-contaminated, then filled again and set in the sun to boil another 22 ounces.
Puzey says one of the easily portable units, which can be propped up anywhere to boil, will take care of the drinking-water needs of a family of four and will last 15 years before the tube loses its vacuum and must be replaced. The replacement tubes cost about $5, and the initial cost of the device is about $40.
Puzey's invention will boil water on cloudy days, as well. He easily boiled water on the roof of the building where QuantaSpec has its headquarters on one recent 46-degree Burlington afternoon.
"I wanted to give people a sustainable way of making safe drinking water, not something that would require resupplying them with chlorine, or fuel to boil the water," Puzey said.
Although he had no idea at the time, Puzey had developed the answer to the Rev. Julius Otieno Nyambuoro's prayers — literally. Pastor Julius, as Nyambuoro is known, is senior pastor at Christ's Commission Fellowship Church in Kisumu, Kenya. The story of how Puzey and Pastor Julius would come together is a remarkable example of serendipity and fate.
Making connections, or not
About a two hour's drive from Kisumu, in a village called Kabondo, Nyambuoro is sheltering 60 orphans who lost their parents to a litany of tragedies including political violence and disease.
"That place is badly hit by HIV/AIDS," Nyambuoro said of Kisumu, a city of about 450,000 people. "Prolonged drought has brought a lot of hunger to people. When people are hungry and suffering, pastors are also suffering, because they look after suffering people."
Nyambuoro, 60, who spoke during an interview on a trip to Vermont, wants to build a proper orphanage in Kabondo, along with a nursery school, primary school and high school. He wants to build a church and a clinic, because now, it's a one-hour drive to health facilities in Kisumu.
"Last year, a child died for us on the way because we were looking for public means to transport the child to hospital," Nyambuoro said. "We don't want to have such a thing happen to us again."
The 2-year-old girl was suffering from malaria.
"These orphans and vulnerable children, we need to support them with all their basic needs, and also in that center, we need a means of transportation," Nyambuoro said.
Last June, Danielle Livellara, a business consultant in Burlington who had worked on start-ups in Africa, was contacted through Facebook by Nyambuoro.
"Somehow he found me online, and we started communicating, and he started telling me about the need," Livellara said. "So we started to plan his trip coming over here."
Distracted by "some personal things," Livellara said she lost touch temporarily with Nyambuoro, and he ended up flying to Indianapolis instead of Burlington.
"Someone who booked the ticked booked the wrong location," Livellara said, adding that she recalled thinking: "'OK, this is interesting. He's in Indianapolis.'"
Livellara gathered some money and bought Nyambuoro a bus ticket for "probably the longest bus ride of his life."
"It was a long, long, long journey," Nyambuoro said.
Once he finally made it to Vermont, things went poorly. He stayed with a sympathetic family in Montpelier while Livellara tried to drum up interest in the plight of the Kenyan orphans — but without much initial success.
"I'm trying to make connections to churches and not having any luck," Livellara said. "We keep trying to do these meetings, and nothing is happening. He's getting ready to go home. I'm feeling terrible. He's been here, and nothing's happened."
The day before Nyambuoro was booked to fly back to Kenya, Livellara decided to throw a party at her lakeside home, out of desperation as much as anything else. She would invite everyone she knew and hope something happened. But first, she had to get Nyambuoro from Montpelier to Burlington. She called Ken Puzey, whom she knew peripherally through her business connections.
"If you know anything about Ken, he's a great guy who will pick you up any time you need it," Livellara said. "We called him; we're like, 'Ken, we're going to do this; the pastor is in Montpelier.' He said, 'I'll go get him.'"
Three hours later, Liverllara was wondering where the pastor and Puzey were.
"We've got dinner made; where are they?" she said. "Ken took him back to his house."
A project is born
When Ken Puzey picked up Julius Nyambuoro in Montpelier, the two began talking, and the pastor admitted he was discouraged. He had been in America for several weeks and had not made a single connection. Worse, he was leaving the next day, empty-handed.
"I said, 'What are you trying to make a connection for?' and he said, 'We need safe drinking water in Kenya,'" Puzey remembered.
Puzey immediately detoured to his house, where he had left a solar boiler on the back deck, full of water. Puzey was a little nervous, because it was an overcast day, and he was unsure how well his demonstration would go. But when he and the pastor walked onto the deck, he could see steam coming from the boiler. The water temperature was 200 degrees, 12 degrees below boiling.
Puzey asked Nyambuoro to pick up the tube, to show him that it was cool to the touch. Then he asked him to dip his pinky in the water, but to do it quickly, else he burn it.
Remembering the encounter nearly a year later, Puzey asked Nyambuoro what he had said at the time.
"This is an answer to my prayers," the pastor replied.
The next day, Nyambuoro flew home to Kenya, and two days after that he called Puzey to tell him the elders of the church had decided to place Puzey in charge of the church's safe water project and orphanage project.
Puzey formed a foundation several years ago named after his grandparents, The Albert and Vivian Puzey Foundation, with the stated mission of "Saving Lives and The Environment." He has now applied for 501c3 status for the foundation so it can take tax-deductible donations for its first big project, the Kisumu Kenya Safe Water Project. Danielle Livellara is project development director.
The Vermont Ecumenical Council and Bible Society, based in Richmond, agreed to accept donations for the safe water project until Puzey's foundation receives its 501c3 status. Roy Hill, president of the council and a lay minister, met Nyambuoro for the first time on his visit to Vermont this spring, but Hill and Puzey had connected last August on the subject of safe drinking water.
"Ken and I came together in another one of those eureka moments," Hill said. "We were at a climate control conference, focusing on care for our youth. I made a presentation; Ken came up afterward and said he was working on a project he thought I should be involved in."
In July 2010, the Ecumenical Society had added a statement to its website regarding the "sanctity" of water.
"We've come together in a way unforeseen by us," Hill said.
Up and running
On April 17, Danielle Livellara put together a fundraiser at Hotel Vermont that drew about 75 people who were entertained by A2Vt, an African hip-hop group based in Winooski. The event raised $6,000.
"There was so much magic in that room," Livellara said. "I've had other people calling me with fundraising ideas."
Holly Stockett and her husband, Bob, hosted Nyambuoro in Barre on this visit to Vermont, and Stockett has agreed to take on overall coordination of the U.S. end of the project.
"I've been a home-schooling mom for many years," Stockett said. "I'm in a new place in my life. I'm going to take it on full-force."
Meanwhile, Ken Puzey is moving things forward on the ground in Kisumu, Kenya. Julius Nyambuoro found a secure location to build the solar boilers, a four-bedroom house near Kisumu's central business district with outbuildings for housing the manufacturing equipment, raw materials and finished product.
Most important, the house is surrounded by high stone wall and secured by an iron gate. Puzey hopes to rent rooms to visiting volunteers and missionaries for $100 per night to help support the project.
"I told Pastor Julius, 'Look, I want to set up the factory; I need a place with a 10-foot-high security wall around it,'" Puzey said. "He said, 'For the security features you ask, this is the only property available.'"
Puzey says he was discouraged at first that the property included a nice house he didn't need, but now he's hoping to raise the roughly $200,000 annual budget to make 5,000 solar boilers from renting the rooms.
The manufacturing process is simple, like the solar boiler itself. A hand-operated punch press, safer than a drill press and requiring no electricity, punches two holes in the stainless steel sheet to accept the threaded rods, nuts and slip rings that secure the glass vacuum tube to the sheet.
After the holes are punched and before the tube is mounted, the sheet is bent into a curve with a slip roller so it will capture and focus solar heat on the tube. Puzey is buying his steel from a supplier in Kisumu, and the rest of his parts, except the slip rings and glass tube, in Kenya. There is no source of the tubes in Kenya, but on his next visit in May, Puzey hopes to find a Kenyan supplier for the slip rings.
"It takes a lot of headaches out if you buy the stuff in country, as opposed to importing it," Puzey said.
Puzey hopes to employ 20 orphans who have aged out of Pastor Julius' orphanage in the solar boiler factory, but so far he can afford to hire only two.
When he left Haiti last April, Puzey said, he felt like he had been fighting a war but lacked the right weapons — the right tools — to win.
"I was determined when I came back that I was going to invent the tools we can win this fight with," Puzey said. "I haven't stopped since then trying to make that happen. I'm just so happy that in February we installed all the tooling in the workshop in Kisumu, and we trained the orphans how to use it. Now it's up to the team to raise more money to keep the materials flowing."
Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or email@example.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.
To learn more about the Kisumu Kenya Safe Water Project, visit http://globalsafewater.org, or email Ken Puzey at firstname.lastname@example.org.