Photo by Jimmy Myers / St. Joseph News-Press

Northwest Missouri State University professor Dr. Michael Bellamy points to the heating elements inside his solar water pasteurizer.

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An orphanage upstart has its challenges — funding, staffing, location, clean water.

Clean water? If your orphanage is in Haiti, then yes. Water ranks as highly as four walls and a roof.

Enter an unlikely purifier.

Michael Bellamy’s job as an associate professor of chemistry at Northwest Missouri State University isn’t his calling, per se. As he puts it, he just kept taking chemistry classes until one day somebody gave him a Ph.D.

Not to be misunderstood, Dr. Bellamy knows that being on a college campus teaching chemistry is where he belongs, but he’s called to a higher purpose at least once a year.

A couple hours north of Port-au-Prince, with the Caribbean coast on one side and a mountain range on the other, sits House of Hope Haiti. It’s home to 16 Haitian orphans.

The orphanage was founded about four years ago by Dr. Bellamy’s mother, Nannette Zander, who worked for many years as a missionary in developing countries but has since retired.

“She said there are kids the same age as our daughter running around the streets begging for food,” Dr. Bellamy said of what convinced him to make his first trip to Trou Baguette, the town that is now home to the orphanage.

A lack of food is just the beginning of the problems Haitians face.

According the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, more than 5 percent of the population has HIV/AIDS. Haitians live to an average of less than 60 years of age, and many run a high risk of food and waterborne diseases, among them “protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E and typhoid fever.” Leptospirosis, a waterborne illness, also is a common affliction.

This is where Dr. Bellamy has proven himself useful.

Planted like a monument on his desk in Northwest’s Garrett-Strong science building are 800 pages of water treatment research in a binder riddled with scribbles and sticky notes. The chemistry professor has studied the subject for two years.

Another thick binder lies at the side of his desk on the floor, but that one is about solar-powered ovens, something he has researched extensively but has since given up hope on bringing to Haiti.

“Before you can really start, you have to read everything that’s out there,” Dr. Bellamy said. “What I did was go through everything I could find.”

What he found was a method to kill all the bacteria, protozoa and parasites found in the water supply. He started with a commercial solar water pasteurizer (retail price, $3,000), discovered its weaknesses, tossed them out and added stability in his own homemade device, which cost about $1,000.

Dr. Bellamy’s pasteurizer employs water-filled copper tubes beneath a copper plate encased in an insulated box with a glass lid. The sun strikes the top of the copper plate and heats the water in the tubes. Once the water heats to 85 degrees Celsius, nearly boiling, a valve opens and the now-pure water empties into a catch.

It might seem difficult to believe that the contraption could heat water to near boiling. Imagine, Dr. Bellamy said, it’s summer and your car seats are made of copper and the windows are rolled up. Now imagine hopping in the car and sitting on those copper seats with bare legs. Still think water wouldn’t sizzle?

Dr. Bellamy and four students from Northwest’s Missouri Academy of Science, Technology and Computing traveled to Haiti over spring break and constructed the device on the orphanage grounds. It produces 100 gallons to 200 gallons (depending on the amount of sunshine) of clean water. But would they drink it?

“If it doesn’t taste good to them,” Dr. Bellamy said, referring to other attempts to purify Haiti’s water using chlorine, “they’re done.”

The director of the orphanage, Mirlande Alcene, poured a cup from the first batch of purified water. She liked it.

Dr. Bellamy now foresees taking the orphanage to another level. The kids will be educated, sure. But he wants to bring what he’s learned about water over the years to the curriculum. They would turn the students into experts who could take their knowledge across the country long after they have left the orphanage.

“The immediate goal is we want a water training center, about half a dozen technologies,” Dr. Bellamy said, adding that he’s searching for grants to help establish the center. “If we get that up and running, then who knows?”

Dr. Bellamy has helped out missions in Latin America where people are poor, but “not so poor that they worry about eating,” he said. The feeling in Haiti is different.

“There is almost a little bit of a feeling of hopelessness there,” he said. “It’s a difficult place to have a mission like this.”

So why do it?

“I believe that all people who claim to have a relationship with their creator should be inspired to do something,” he said, explaining that he doesn’t mean to sound judgmental. “If you look at the world around us, there is so much hurting, so many people starving. I think it’s (helping those in need) what we’re called to do. It’s what we’re put on this earth to do.”

Jimmy Myers can be reached at jimmymyers@npgco.com.