Elan Head:

In late 2013, I traveled to Papua New Guinea on assignment for Vertical Magazine to write a story about helicopter operations in the country. At the time, I happened to be enrolled in a global health class taught by, among others, the late Dr. Paul Farmer. Through that connection, I met the regional director for CHAI, a global health organization. He mentioned that CHAI was seeking a deputy country director for PNG; I mentioned that my mom, Carey Lafferty, had a master’s in health services administration. A few months later, she was flying halfway around the world for an interview.

Ultimately, my mom spent a good part of 2014 and 2015 working for CHAI in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province. She had a number of wonderful colleagues, many of whom I met during a trip back to PNG about halfway through her tenure. Among them, one stood out: Philip Wayaki Bongi, who was employed by CHAI as a monitoring and evaluation officer and research assistant. Philip had grown up as the son of subsistence farmers in the small village of Kifidomeku. With a lot of hard work and help from friends who recognized his potential, he had obtained a bachelor’s degree from a university in PNG, and his position at CHAI was his first job after graduation.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe the Highlands of PNG to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves. It is spectacularly beautiful country, but also incredibly rugged. Imagine terrain comparable to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, with peaks exceeding 12,000 feet, then imagine it covered in tropical jungle, and you’ll have an idea of how difficult it is to get around. Tribes in PNG evolved in extreme isolation — the country has more than 800 languages — and while geography is not the only reason for this, it is one of them. PNG is rich in natural resources, but these have mostly been exploited by outsiders (that’s where the helicopters come in). Many people in the country live in conditions that Westerners would consider extreme deprivation.

PNG has the usual challenges related to poverty and colonialism, plus some additional problems, such as tribal violence, associated with its unique heritage. “The nature of work in the Highlands is that you are very reliant on each other,” my mom told me recently, “and I was especially reliant on Wayaki.” Yet, Philip is not just someone who kept my mom safe; he is someone whom she came to respect enormously for his intelligence and character. He became a genuine friend with whom she stayed in regular contact even after leaving PNG, and he became my friend by extension.

Philip is married with two children: a son who is almost nine years old and a daughter who is seven. At this point, he was worked for a number of non-governmental organizations, including CARE International, Save the Children, and DT Global. Philip has built a life and career around caring for others, yet he is always looking for ways to do more.

Last year, Philip emailed my mom to tell her about a new project. Although he lives in Goroka now, he was distressed that the several thousand people in his home village lacked access to safe drinking water. They were collecting their water from streams, and population growth meant that these sources were often contaminated. Waterborne diseases such as typhoid were common and frequently fatal. As a secondary consequence, these tragic early deaths sometimes led to other villagers being unjustly accused of sorcery or witchcraft.

Philip on his own initiative reached out to WaterStep, a charity based in Louisville, Kentucky, that was founded in 1995 by Mark and Marcia Hogg. Mark had first recognized the profound importance of clean drinking water as a college student on a work trip in Burkina Faso, when he was haunted by the sound of funeral drums for deaths caused by waterborne illness. WaterStep’s mission, its staff members like to say, is to quiet those drums.

Philip connected with Claudia Daniels, WaterStep’s director of international partnerships and missions, who has been with the organization since 2002. Its approach has evolved considerably over that time, she told me. “When we first started, we would kind of hop, skip, and jump around the world and put in these water projects and see if they worked,” she said. “And we realized that we were getting good results, but we weren’t getting great results.”

Claudia said a key insight came when the WaterStep team witnessed a woman coming to get clean water with a dirty container. “This light bulb just went off,” she said. “I was like, ‘Duh, there’s the problem.’ So we started teaching health education, we started teaching about using bleach to sanitize containers. And then we started seeing great results.”

But Claudia said that the real transformation came as 3G cell service and internet access became more widespread in the regions where they were working, enabling WaterStep to conduct much of its training and oversight virtually. “Not only were we getting great results, but we were now getting real sustainable results because people were taking care of their own water issues instead of relying on someone to come in and tell them how to do it,” she said.

WaterStep now has 147 field consultants spread across 70 different countries, all of them volunteers. One of them is Philip, whom WaterStep agreed to support with funding and equipment, including a chlorine generator and bleach maker. Over the past couple of months, Philip and his team of locals have been working to pipe water from a local stream into tanks for treatment. The water will be distributed to villagers in Kifidomeku

and neighboring Yauwaro. Philip has been pouring his heart and soul into the project and I’ve chipped in to make their work a little easier.

Claudia told me that WaterStep doesn’t make just anyone a field consultant. “I don’t really call them a field consultant until I get the feeling that they are going to expand,” she said. “We have a lot of people that just do a project here and there, and that’s kind of it. But there are 147 of them out in the world that I know have or will expand their projects to include their neighbors, and then train somebody else who will then train somebody else, and grow it that way.”

And Philip is already eager to expand. The chlorine generator will make more treated water than Kifidomeku and Yauwaro need, so Philip would like to extend the pipeline downhill to serve the communities of Korepadoka, Kombadoka, Goreheiuka, and Yangoroka. However, that will cost about US$11,000 more than the current project has budgeted for. I will be making a donation to support the extension, and if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider doing so as well. You can donate to WaterStep here [link to come] and if you specify that the donation is for Philip Wayaki Bongi, your funds will go to support his project. WaterStep is a registered 501(c)(3) charity and all donations are tax-deductible in the U.S.

Speaking with Claudia, I was struck by how much of my own success in life has been underpinned by basic resources that I’ve largely taken for granted, including clean water. The most obvious impact of WaterStep’s projects is that fewer people die of preventable diseases — a quieting of those funeral drums. But there are also many knock-on effects that can be transformative for individuals and communities over the long run.

“The outcome of [clean water] is so much more than health,” Claudia said. “Yes, they have better health, but because they have better health, the children are in school all the time. Because they have better health, they can go out and work in the fields more often. What we’re seeing it is that it is empowering the family with better education, higher income levels — it changes everything when you’re not sick all the time.”

To me, Philip is the ultimate example of how people with intelligence, drive, and outstanding moral character can be found everywhere in this world, even in small rural villages in Papua New Guinea. But how much they’re able to accomplish with their talents is proportional to their opportunities. What’s so remarkable to me about Philip is how much of his time, labor, and reputation he has directed not toward improving his own station in life, but toward expanding opportunities for others. He is an inspiration to me, and I hope you find him inspiring, too