Spokane nonprofit prepares medical, well-drilling shipment for Guatemala

The discarded medical equipment that has been filling the shop of retired well driller Gary Bartholomew began its long journey to warmer climes Friday morning.

Bartholomew looked on as his son, Rod, lined up a stack of stretchers on a forklift and began hoisting them into the container that will take them to rural Guatemala.

“You’re fine, go ahead and go into it, right on in,” the older Bartholomew said, guiding with his hands. The donated supplies will make up the second shipment of goods delivered to the Central American country by local nonprofit Water for Life this year.

The group, started 11 years ago by the Bartholomews, has drilled 79 wells in the villages surrounding Poptun, Guatemala. It began with a single World War II-era military truck and a refurbished cable drill from retired Mennonites, said Tim Rasmussen, president and chairman of the group.

“I have seen villages where the mothers collect the water on one side of the pond, and cattle are standing on the other side,” said Rasmussen, who is also the elected prosecutor in Stevens County.

The World Health Organization has identified water-borne illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A as the world’s leading killer. A 2012 study by WHO showed 842,000 deaths worldwide that year could be attributed to diarrhea caused by contaminated water. Of those deaths, 361,000 were children younger than 5 years old.

Gary Bartholomew began drilling wells at the orphanage where he adopted his daughter, Summer, in 1985. After those wells were dug, other villages began to request the service, and volunteer drillers from throughout the country were recruited to dig in Guatemala in the winter months, when jobs are hard to come by because of the frozen earth in North America.

“There’s 160 villages within a 30-mile radius (of Poptun),” Bartholomew said. “So it will be a long time before we run out of need.”

The organization has become more entrenched in recent years. The group has built apartments in Guatemala to house seasonal drillers. They’ve added two rigs to the fleet, bringing the total number of drilling machines to three.

“We’re all volunteers,” Bartholomew said. “We’re not grant writers or anything.”

The group has benefited from some luck and a relatively stable government. Forty years of civil war ended in 1996, and democratic elections have been held since then, though the country is still dealing with the aftermath of prolonged war and the alleged genocide of Mayan people in the early 1980s.

The second year volunteers traveled to Guatemala to dig, the project was almost undone, Rasmussen said. The military truck they’d been using to drill had broken down, and they needed an obscure mechanical part that was no longer in production to get it running again. A few frenzied phone calls put the group in touch with a collector in Rathdrum, Idaho, and the exact part the group needed, Rasmussen said.

“He called it coincidence; we called it providence,” Rasmussen said.

Gary Bartholomew, who retired two years ago from the water pump business he’d inherited from his father, estimated he spends about half of each year either working in Guatemala or preparing medical supplies and drilling equipment for use there. A recent donation to the group covered the roughly $5,500 cost to ship the container down the West Coast, and it enabled Bartholomew to clear the boxes of fresh linens, baby incubators, exam tables and motorized wheelchairs that have sat unused in his shop for three years.

Rod Bartholomew, who plans to take his two daughters to Guatemala next year, said the work to bring clean water to villages is deeply satisfying.

“It’s one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done,” Bartholomew said. “You come back years later, and they say, ‘We no longer have any infants dying from the water.’ You can’t put a number on that.”

The container will leave from Seattle and should arrive in Guatemala next month, just as the elder Bartholomew and Rasmussen arrive to begin several weeks of work expanding the group’s mission.

Rasmussen said there has been some turmoil in the country regarding imports, and because this is the group’s first shipment that contains mostly medical supplies, there are some questions about the shipment passing customs.

“It’s in the Lord’s hands now,” Gary Bartholomew said.