Imagine rising every morning to find that one of your assumed environmental constants, clean abundant water, has become a rarity to slave for, treasure, and allot for use only with utmost care, drop by drop. If you live in a rural area, you may have to walk for six hours on steep slopes to fill your water jug and then carry the weighty jar back home. Or you might send your children to fetch the water, but then they won't have time to attend school that day. If you're in a city, you may rise at 2:00 a.m. to queue up at the common tap so that you can catch your portion of the flow during the few hours each day that the water runs. In either case, your supply is limited to a few liters per day. Perhaps you are one of the few lucky ones to have a tap in your home fed by a private water tank on your rooftop. That means that you have a steady supply of gravity-fed water, although you must have the tank refilled regularly. Even then, however, you have no guarantee that the water is safe. In fact, if you looked into the matter, you would learn that contaminated water is responsible for a full 80% of the country's illness, that around 40,000 children die from water-borne illness before the age of five, that gastroenteritis is a part of daily life, and that water-borne diseases like dysentery, hepatitis, and even cholera are not uncommon.

These are the daily circumstances of life in Nepal, as well as in many other developing countries. This is why Nepalese, when asked what single factor would most improve their lives, overwhelmingly pinpoint the availability of water. And this is why a dozen University of Iowa faculty and students traveling in Nepal this past summer focused for an entire month on drinking-water problems.