Kevin Kelly/Key photo Maria Smith-Nilson shows a slide of a Central American community that has benefitted from a project engineered by WaterPartners International.

It was the 1.5 billion people throughout the world who still lack access to safe water that forced Gary White and Marla Smith-Nilson of the Columbia, Mo.-based nonprofit agency to express their frustration over not being able to do even more.

White, who grew up in St. Bernadette Parish and graduated from Archbishop O'Hara High School, founded WaterPartners International 10 years ago to provide rudimentary water treatment facilities to villages in Central America.

Each year, WaterPartners has sponsored a dinner at White's home parish to raise money to help yet another village. Through that dinner and similar events in other cities, WaterPartners International has helped some 35 villages with 12,000 people to obtain a safe supply of water tapped right into their homes.

And each and every one of the water treatment projects engineered by WaterPartners is still operating.

But that's not enough, White told more than 300 people at Msgr. Bauer Hall who dined on chicken cordon bleu and barbecued beef brisket.

Every year, millions worldwide continue to die simply because they have no access to clean water.

"This is no mystery," White said. "We know how to make water safe. We don't have to search for a miracle cure. We can do it today."

But having access to water means more than being able to cook safely or to wash regularly, Smith-Nilson told the crowd as she showed them slides of the people WaterPartners helped.

To an older woman named Juana, Smith-Nilson said, it means being able to grow fresh vegetables and flowers.

"She told me she wants to grow old watching flowers grow in pots on her porch," Smith-Nilson said. "Who wouldn't want that? Who doesn't deserve that?"

Smith-Nilson showed a picture of a woman named Jesus, who once had to walk five times a day to the nearest creek in order to carry back a jug filled with water weighing 25 pounds.

"She told us she has time to do other things now, and that her kids have time to study for school rather than help her carry water," Smith-Nilson said.

But Smith-Nilson said the lack of decent water, which she said is clearly the No. 1 health problem in the world today, was also an epidemic that is largely unrecognized.

"What angers me is that people are not aware of this, that unsafe water is the No. 1 killer of children in the world," she said. "People will have safe water only when enough people are outraged enough to make a change."

White said this year's fund-raising banquet was twice the size of any previous banquet at St. Bernadette Parish, and will provide grant money which, coupled with money raised by the villagers, will provide the funds to start new water treatment projects in two villages - La Quesera, Honduras, and Paraxamolo, Guatemala.

But it's not enough, White said.

"I realize I am impatient because WaterPartners has not reached its full potential," White said.

"Every year, millions of people die because they can't take a drink of safe water. These people are evaporating from our midst every day. How basic is this? How hard is it to accept that so many people suffer every day?"

White announced that WaterPartners International would step up its efforts in order to reach more people with larger water treatment projects.

"What we are proposing is a new initiative - the Water for 2000 campaign," he said. "We want to raise money in the year 2000 so that an additional 2,000 families will have safe drinking water."

In addition, he said, WaterPartners will step up fund-raising in order to "scale up our methodology to reach communities in the 20,000 population range."

"We are reaching out to you," he said. "We are going to seriously pursue our vision of everyone taking a safe drink of water."

White urged those in attendance at St. Bernadette to reach out to others and to raise awareness of the problem of unsafe water.

More information, he said, can be obtained from WaterPartners International, P.O. Box 654, Columbia, Mo., 65205-0654; or from the Internet at www.water.org.

Donations can also be sent to the address in Columbia, he said.