By Suzanne Hodgson
Staff Writer

It wasn’t a break from the gray sky and snow that sent Norm Labbe to Guatemala last week.
 It was the water.
As superintendent of the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District, Labbe knows how to make clean water.
He is working with Partners in Development, a non-profit organization out of Ipswich, Mass., to bring the Third World country clean water through simply crafted filters made out of available materials.
Labbe’s clean water filters cost around $50, but he’s working on a new plan to bring the filters to more households.
“It’s a real great challenge to make small reusable filters that cost under $20 American,” said Labbe. “It provides a family with good drinking water for years.”
During this trip, Labbe was able to set up clean water filters to the two schools in Conception and add another filter to a school in Desierto.
“We got the filter up and running and we toasted the first glasses of water. She[the principal] took a glass, toasted and said ‘salud,’” said Labbe.
In Guatemala, Labbe explains, much of the country does not have clean running water. In his pictures from the trip, people are shown cleaning their clothes in streams and rivers and drying them out over rocks or in government-installed three-compartment sinks with dirty well water.
Labbe said in the rainy season almost everyone in Guatemala has intestinal worms.
“Our primary push was to go around the village [Conception] to the 12 large filters installed in the past year,” said Labbe. “We checked them to see how to run them better.”
In 2008, PID gave a presentation to the Kennebunk Rotary Club, where Labbe is a member, about helping the organization in Guatemala and Haiti.
By February of the following year, after talking with Lisa Lassey, director of program development for PID, Labbe was on his first trip down to Guatemala to look at available supplies to build a fresh water pump.
Less than a year later, a few villages and schools in the country have fresh water.
“It’s no big deal, it’s what I like to do,” said Labbe. “We’re helping people in a real way. It’s sort of depressing. You’re just trying to do your little part. You look at the need, the bottomless pit of need.”
Labbe’s son, Chris, 18, accompanied him on the trip, but the long hours and unfavorable conditions led both father and son to return home feeling sick.
“When you go there it’s not about yourself, it’s about the mission,” said Labbe. “A military guy I was working with down there said you ‘work to the spec.(specification) not to the clock’ and that’s what we did.”
Labbe’s filters are housed in 55-gallon plastic drums. At the bottom of the drum, a piece of plastic pipe is bent into a circle and small holes are drilled into the pipe. The circular pipe is covered in a nylon hose and placed at the bottom of the barrel.
The barrel is then filled with a thick layer of coarse sand and, after being hand sifted, a layer of fine sand. At the top of the barrel is placed a plastic sandwich container with holes cut in the bottom to drain water onto the layer of sand.
A hole is drilled at the bottom to connect a faucet.
The coarse filter can clean up to 300 gallons of water daily, but at $50 a pump, Labbe is working on cheaper alternatives.
“I like adventure, making things out of nothing. I’ve always been a do-it-myself-er,” said Labbe.
Labbe said he is not done traveling with PID. While he was in Guatemala, the earthquake hit Haiti killing an estimated 150,000 people.
PID President Gail Hull, who was working with Labbe in Guatemala at the time, flew to Haiti last weekend and Labbe helped her gather supplies to clean the water.
Dunkin’ Donuts in Kennebunk donated commercial size coffee filters to sift out dirt in the water. The Kittery Trading Post donated seven bottles of iodine, enough to treat several thousand gallons of water. P&E in Sanford donated quick dissolving chlorine tablets and Labbe and his crew at the water district helped locate ascorbic acid and test kits.
 “It’s a quickie way to get it drinkable so it’s not going to cause disease,” said Labbe. “Safe water, that’s what they need.”
Haul was limited to 32 pounds of luggage to take to Haiti and could not bring anything heavy to make the filters herself.
In the coming weeks, Labbe hopes he can visit Haiti  to bring more solutions to the clean water problem. He returns to Guatemala in June.
“Overall it’s dirty, cluttered and very poor, so that’s a little depressing,” said Labbe. “You got to look at it in the context, that’s how they live. They’re happy. Ignorance is bliss.”

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.