ShawneeDispatch.com

The Wells for Life organization may have been founded in California, but it took on a whole new life once it was relocated to Kansas.

And now the Shawnee-based charity, which helps dig wells to provide safe drinking water for villages in India, will get another boost from Kansans on Saturday at the Shawnee Rotary Club’s inaugural Sunset in the Park event at the Theatre in the Park Pavilion.

Michael Viser, founder of Wells for Life, said the support he has found in the past four years in Kansas has strengthened his organization, and he hopes the Rotary event will help him spread the word even further.

“This Sunset in the Park is the first real event we’ve done (since moving to Kansas),” he said. “This is new ground for us, so it’s exciting.”

Viser founded the organization after his own eye-opening experiences in India. He first went there in 1999 with his father, who is a church pastor in New Mexico, at a time when he said he was seeking something to reaffirm his faith and give him a stronger purpose in life.

“I wanted to do something of significance and purpose and be part of a change,” Viser said. “I wanted to see change in my life and change in other people’s life.”

The first trip inspired a second trip in 2001, when Viser realized that one of the best ways to help people living in the primitive conditions there was to help them dig wells to have a safe water source, which can drastically cut the incidence of disease — more than 6,000 children die daily in India due to sickness and disease related to bad water and poor sanitation.

A well can cost as little as $1,500. For larger scale projects where water is supplied to an entire school or orphanage, cost ranges from $2,500 to $10,000 depending upon the size and scope of the work.

Wells for Life works with Indian partners to determine which small villages, generally with 50 to 2,000 people, are most in need of wells. Partners range from an orphanage director who works with hundreds of villages to the coordinator of an Indian version of Habitat for Humanity.

“It’s those local people who are the ones ascertaining which villages have the greatest needs,” Viser said. “I just give the guidance that we help those in villages that are the most remote and help the lowest caste of people.”

Wells for Life has been able to dig about 50-55 wells a year since its founding, though most recently, the average has increased to 62-64.

Viser was living in California’s Orange County when he founded Wells for Life, and his journey to Kansas wouldn’t start until 2004. He had started leading missionary groups on trips to India, including groups from Westside Family Church, which at the time was getting ready to move from its Shawnee location to its current facility in Lenexa.

Viser became friends with Westside members and eventually came to visit in 2006 and was impressed by the friendly people, open space and clean air.

After bringing his family to Kansas over spring break, they agreed to relocate, and it took just two weeks for them to sell their house in California and buy one in Olathe.

Viser said he was sitting in Shawnee’s Country Club Café while in town to finalize the purchase of his home when he ran into Schaun Colin, former owner of the café, pastor at Westside and founder of Oceans of Mercy.

“I said, ‘I’ve moved to Kansas now; where should I go to set up a bank account and a post office box (for Wells for Life)?’” Viser said. “And he said ‘Well, you’re in a café in a bank, and there’s a post office right down the street.’”

So while Viser runs the organization from his home, he is in Shawnee often to get mail from the post office or meet with friends at Country Club Café — which is where he was when he met some Shawnee Rotary Club members, eventually leading them to select Wells for Life as one of the charitable organizations that the first annual Sunset in the Park event will benefit, Viser said

“It’s been interesting – living in California… there’s wealth all around you, and you would just assume that people would be generous with their wealth, and yet, that wasn’t the case,” Viser said.

But once he started working with Westside members in 2004, he started noticing more and more Kansas addresses on the donations to his organization. He said moving the organization to Kansas has only helped it grow.

“There’s a greater generosity I believe here, as well as a general compassion,” he said. “It just seemed like people are friendlier, people are nicer, people are more concerned.”

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