Less than a year ago, children as young as 6 in Iraya, a small village south of Manila in the Philippines, began their days walking more than a mile round-trip before school to fetch drinking water for their breakfasts. They repeated their treks at noon and again in the evening. The cause of the inconvenient water collecting: Clean drinking water was not reasonably accessible to the inhabitants of Iraya.

Before December 2008, most of the drinking water came from open springs, open dug wells and shallow artesian wells. The water almost always tested positive for fecal coliform bacteria. Recurring diarrhea became a part of children's lives — especially every time some rain contaminated the water sources.

But that all changed in December 2007 when LDS Church welfare missionaries Leopoldo and Pilar Fonbuena received a letter from local health workers requesting assistance with water sanitation. By the next year Iraya had a spring-capture water collection system.

Read the full story via MormonTimes.com.