Meet The People

The story of Lisa Teller

The Water Lady

Darlene Arviso is known as the water lady in Smith Lake, N.M., on the Navajo Nation. She delivers water to 250 people each month. That's because Arviso hauls water for tribe members of the Navajo Nation, where, on average, residents use 7 gallons a day to drink, cook, bathe and clean. The average person in the U.S. uses about 100 gallons a day.

Hundreds of thousands of American children still don't have clean, running water at home. Baby Lisa is one of them.

Baby Lisa was born with Microvillus Inclusion Disease and needs a feeding tube. She could get sick or even die without clean, running water at home, so Baby Lisa lives in a medical facility three hours away from the family that loves her.

Families like Baby Lisa's live totally different lives from yours. They often wake up and collect water from a source outside their home, fetching it in buckets or boiling it on the stove. When desperate, many collect water from unsafe sources contaminated with bacteria, arsenic or even uranium.