The Story of Vera Aqua Vera Vita
August 14, 2020 | Dallas, Texas
The inception of the idea to start an organization to bring clean water to communities in developing countries started in 2011. It all began when Jacob Niemeier, the founder, went on his first foreign mission trip to Haiti one year after the devastating 2010 earthquake with a team of students from St. Thomas Aquinas’, the Catholic Newman Center at Purdue University. He was studying Environmental & Natural Resources Engineering in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering department with a focus on Water Resources. The department he was in at Purdue was a unique one with much focus and emphasis on engineering solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems such as poverty, the food crisis, and the global water crisis. He credits his academics for instilling a basic understanding of the needs of people in developing countries. Thus, being exposed at least objectively to the severity of the problems those in developing countries face, he thought himself prepared to witness it firsthand with his own two eyes. However, he was nonetheless shocked when on that fateful mission trip to Haiti his eyes were truly opened, through a lived experience, to the reality of the immense need of those in developing countries.
One story sticks with him every time he thinks back on that trip. During their first day in Haiti, while traveling from the airport in Port Au Prince up into the mountains where their mission trip was to take place, he was overwhelmed by the severity of poverty. Even a year after the earthquake, the city was still mostly in ruins and most people were still living in blue UN emergency-aid tents as far as the eye could see. There was a woman that walked from her tent carrying a bucket to the canal that was flowing through the city and filled up her bucket with water that looked like chocolate milk, had animals defecating and walking around in it, was visibly full of trash and litter, and had people washing their clothes and dumping their waste into it. He knew that was the water her and her family were going to drink and use for cooking which he knew was very likely to get them sick if not kill them. Witnessing this, other likewise heartbreaking poor living standards, and feeling a call from the Lord to utilize his God-given gifts, skills, and passions is what inspired and set him on the path to eventually start Vera Aqua Vera Vita to bring True Water True Life to communities in need.
Knowing that starting an International Nonprofit NGO was a big undertaking, he recognized his need to gain more business, professional, and engineering experience while expanding his network along the way. Thus, after graduating from Purdue in 2012, he decided to take a job as a water resources engineering consultant and move to Dallas. From July 2012 to December 2016, Jacob worked diligently as an Engineer in Training (E.I.T.), continued to foster this idea, talked about this passion of his to anybody & everybody that would listen, and steadily grow his network until when in December 2016 he obtained his Professional Engineering (P.E.) license. During those four years it became evident that the Lord was indeed calling him to start an organization to serve communities in need in developing countries with access to clean water, but the question was always how? The answer to this question became abundantly evident in May of 2015 when a couple of Jacob’s friends approached him about an opportunity to bring clean water to a community in need. These friends had been on a mission trip to the Piura region of Peru in which a few members of the pueblo of Monte Castillo had approached them to ask if they could help them get clean water because their children and elderly were suffering and dying. And so, in a sense this is when it all began as Jacob and his friends embarked on a journey to figure out how to bring clean water to the 7,000+ people in the community. Over the next year and a half, they established relationships, comprehensively assessed the situation in the community, and began development of conceptual solutions. Thus, when December 2016 (a year and a half later), having received his P.E. license, Jacob felt it was finally time to capitalize on the momentum created by the Monte Castillo project and begin making moves to officially form an organization that could be the main driver behind implementing solutions in Monte Castillo. Finally, on June 13, 2017, Vera Aqua Vera Vita incorporated as a Nonprofit and began in earnest their mission to bring “True Water True Life” to the less fortunate in developing countries. Ultimately Vera Aqua Vera Vita’s first project that began all the way back in May 2015 came to completion when the solution to Monte Castillo’s water crisis, a Water Treatment Facility, commenced operations on August 3, 2019. And so, concludes the story of how Vera Aqua Vera Vita came to be, but the story of where it will go from here has yet to be written. Witness this story unfold by joining the Vera Aqua Vera Vita “Visionary” contact list right here and help shape the story by donating or volunteering!
