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By THERESA REYNOLDS
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
• A young girl stuggles through adolescence, keeping clean as best she can with only a tub and a pump in the yard;
• A housewife spends her early morning hours emptying and cleaning slop buckets for her family, then trying to wash dishes and scrub floors with water hauled uphill from the creek;
• A little boy skips gym classes, then starts skipping school, embarrassed by gym clothes that he is unable to wash.
According to Micheline Hostetter, who works for the Fauquier Community Action Committee, these are difficult problems that happen not only in third world countries but in Rappahannock County day after day.
“People from urban areas drive through and they think it’s really cute to see our old privies,” said Mrs. Hostetter. “But being deprived of water is not funny. It’s a sad, humiliating part of the discouraging cycle of being poor, losing hope, and feeling so unpresentable that the reaction of others really hurts.”
For the past fifteen years, said Hostetter, the Virginia Water Project has been trying to help poor Virginians acquire the one convenience that would most effectively help them change their lives: pure, clean, easily available water.
And, for the most part, this ambitious effort has been a private one. A major grant from the Ford Foundation has sponsored the Virginia Water Project since 1969. Based in Roanoke, its the only agency in the state with this specific goal.
Now, says Mrs. Hostetter, grants are becoming available for low-income Rappahannock residents who are without clean water.
The nature of the project, which reviews applications one by one gives it a flexibility often missing from bureaucratic procedures.
Assistance comes in many forms. In other areas of the state, community wells have provided safe water to very isolated low-income settlements of three to 10 families. Grants for connection fees and hookon costs help poor families benefit from new . or extended community water and sewer services. According to Elaine Stinson of the agency’s headquarters in Roanoke, Water Project funds have already helped three Sperryville families purchase
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