Twice I almost didn’t enter Burma (Myanmar). The first time it was because of an ethical decision I’d faced for many years: whether to go there at all. Some argue that just to go there amounts to supporting one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. I understand their point of view. Others say that Aung San Suu Kyi has publicly appealed to foreigners not to visit Burma precisely because she knows that her appeal will result in her true desired outcome - the opposite effect of more foreign tourism by people who can then report first-hand on the contemporary plight of the Burmese people. The second time it was pragmatic. I’d left Thailand on one passport and tried to enter Burma on another. As I soon found out that’s a big “no-no” in a country like Burma.

After a few hours of interrogation by Burmese Immigration I was finally allowed into the country. I first worked in the area across the Thai border where I soon met another traveler who’d just come from the area I was heading to. When I told him where I was heading he recommended to me an independent tour guide who had been his guide a week earlier. A few days later I flew to Heho and was based for a week in Nyaung Swhe town at the top of Inle Lake from where I would conduct my main assignment. I managed to find my former travel companion’s guide on my first day and arranged for him to accompany me to many of the surrounding villages inhabited by the area’s indigenous peoples.

Before setting out the next morning on our first trip we bought a two-day supply of food and I bought a 2 liter bottle of mineral water. The first village was only about a one-hour walk away but I had finished that bottle long before we arrived there. After arriving I soon unloaded my water filtration pump and began replenishing the now-empty bottle. Before I knew it – and only within a few minutes – it seemed the whole village had gathered to watch what I was doing.

The villagers had never seen such a device and neither – to my surprise – had my guide. He translated my simple explanation that if I drank the water unfiltered I would surely fall sick. “Sick” was the magic word. I was immediately asked to attend to two young boys who had fallen sick three days earlier.

I have no formal, medical training but in this situation I was, relatively, a medical expert. I was soon led to the home of the first boy. Fortunately I have enough basic, medical knowledge that his and the other boy’s diagnosis was, after the translation into English of their recent activity, clearly a stomach virus introduced by drinking local, contaminated river water.

I spent the next two hours in that village showing the villagers how to use my filtration pump and while they were busy pumping a three-day supply I got both boys to drink as much clean drinking water as they could and then prepared a simple soup meal for them (they hadn’t eaten in three days). After explaining further care instructions through my guide I decided to return to the village three days later to check up on my “patients.”

I must admit I was a little nervous when my guide and I repeated our journey to that village three days later. For all I knew these boys might be in worse health – or even dead – and I would certainly be blamed for that. Upon re-entering the village I was given a hero’s welcome and the boys’ parents insisted that I take this photo. I then joined the villagers in an almost-ceremonial pumping of another three-day supply of clean water.

I wonder now, as we begin to wake up to the environmental consequences of our recent history, how much more frequent this story of children made sick from lack of clean drinking water will become.