Eliminating World Thirst, Providing Hope And Building Relationships – That’s The Mission Of The Nonprofit ‘Defy Thirst’

From left, Defy Thirst founders Matt Turner and Stephen Dupuis stand over a water filtration system implemented at the Manta Orphanage in Ecuador. The two leave to work in Haiti on another water project Friday.

LAWRENCEVILLE — They’re young, ambitious, educated, hard working and well-travelled, and the goal they have for the nonprofit organization they’ve formed — Defy Thirst— is simple. Twenty-four-year-olds’ Matt Turner and Stephen Dupuis want to empower the poverty stricken people of the world to stand up and do what their organization’s name states, defy thirst.  Turner and Dupuis hope to accomplish this by making clean, safe water available to all through providing cheap, efficient water filtration technology to those who want it.

Starting Friday and over the next couple of weeks, the two and their team of volunteers will put this strategy to the test in the village of Petit Goave, a town southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the city ravaged by a deadly earthquake in January that left tens if not hundreds of thousands of people dead. They’re also planning trips this year to work on projects in Kenya, Tanzania, India and Ghana, where Dupuis once lived doing HIV education work. Cambodia is even a possibility.

For both Turner and Dupuis, the idea to give people access to water came to them while attending a Christian church sports camp a few years ago in Missouri. Simply put, the two became friends and both wanted to do something positive for the world. And as the two travelled together in the undeveloped world, they also saw how rural communities often struggled to meet basic human needs, like having access to clean water.

For Turner, who studies water microbiology as a graduate student in the Rollins School of Public Health at Atlanta’s Emory University, he’s dedicated his life to this type of work. He even got his start working on small water filtration systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When he last visited Haiti, he got sick, most likely from the water, by eating a “gourmet” Haitian meal of spaghetti noodles and ketchup.

An unidentified orphan from the Manta Orphanage in Ecuador watches clean water come through a Defy Thirst water filtration system as the group's cofounder Stephen Dupuis looks on. Defy Thirst likes to employ different technologies that are site specific depending on a village or city's water needs on the ground.

“I was sickened by what I saw,” Turner said. “Water microbiology is the basis for all water-borne diseases in the world… The statistic is that less than one percent of all water projects in the world are still in existence and working one year after their install date. So you’ve got all these nonprofits, churches, community groups that raise all this money for these water projects, but because there is no long term investment in the community, it just disappears and doesn’t have the impact that people are running around saying that it had.”

And that’s what these two want to change. They don’t just want to provide clean water in a sustainable fashion; they also want to build life-lasting relationships with the people in the villages they serve.

“One of the important things in the effectiveness of a project is how involved are the people in the community and how much do they want it,” Turner said. “You can’t just come into a community and say, ‘Hey, you need clean water.’ If they (villagers) don’t see it as important, they won’t take care of whatever you put in there or they won’t use it or they’ll take it apart and sell the parts for a little bit of money.”

“There are so many different problems you have to look at,” Dupuis said. “We don’t want to just drop a system off and leave.”

“Over a long period of time what we want to do is take these communities we work in and be a partner with them in turning their situation around but allowing them to turn their situations around by working with us,” Turner said. “It’s all about helping people. For us it’s about accomplishing something in our lifetime.”   

Both Turner and Dupuis and their Defy Thirst nonprofit have already completed a successful water project in Ecuador at an orphanage and also at a 4-H camp here in Georgia in Dahlonega. They’ve joined the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, are actively fundraising and applying for grants, and even hope to form a for-profit company that can provide jobs and eventually cover the nonprofit’s administrative costs. And with the word spreading about the mission they are embarking upon, they don’t even have to seek out projects. Rather, the projects are finding them.

“People just come to us,” Turner said. “We’ve got friends in Haiti and they came to us and said this community has asked for help. In Ghana, it was a church that came to us and asked us for help with clean water. In April, we’ll go there to work in a village with about 3,000 people to bring them clean water.”

“Each system is going to be different,” Dupuis adds. “You can’t just say one technology will work.”

“We’re very research oriented,” Turner said. “We try to be grounded to the science to be effective by doing lots of monitoring and evaluation so that we’re effective and not throwing people’s money away.”

And for anyone looking to donate money to a good cause in the undeveloped world that will help the unfortunate, not throwing people’s money away is exactly the words you’d want to hear.

To hear more about the water filtration systems used and the project process Defy Thirst employs, click here.

To learn more about the organization and to donate money to this 501(c)(3), visit www.defythirst.org

An upclose look at part of a water filtration system developed by the nonprofit Defy Thirst.

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