Ursuline Sister of Mount St. Joseph Larraine Lauter held the hand of an infant patient in a cholera clinic in Verrettes, Haiti, in 2017. Water With Blessings, the non-profit led by Sister Lauter, has donated more than 15,000 Sawyer PointOne water filters to women in Haiti and succeeded in eradicating cholera in three communities.

Local charity aids in fight against cholera

As Sister Larraine Lauter held the tiny hand of an infant patient at a cholera clinic in Verrettes, Haiti, she made a silent promise.

“I made a promise to her, in my heart, that she wouldn’t have to be back in that hospital,” said Sister Lauter, recalling the moment recently from her Middletown office on a sunny September morning.

Sister Lauter — an Ursuline Sister of Mount St. Joseph and the co-founder of the local non-profit Water With Blessings — is on track to keep the promise she made in 2017.

Shortly before that visit to Haiti, Water With Blessings had launched a campaign to eradicate cholera there. Since then, Verrettes, a community of close to 50,000 people and two other communities in Haiti — Anse-A-Veau, with a population of about 35,000, and Cornillion, with more than 54,000 inhabitants — have been cholera-free, said Sister Lauter.

A few months after she met the suffering infant, that cholera clinic was closed — a sign there were no reported cases of cholera, said Sister Lauter.

See the full article by Ruby Thomas here.