In rural Haiti, looking for a way to make clean water sustainable Antoine Jean Narol, Castel's fellow water operator down the road in Simon, knows the problem. He teaches accounting at a local university and spends three hours a day at the local water authority, supervising workers, preparing reports and drawing no pay. "If someone has to suffer, it has to be me," he said simply. Castel and Narol are part of an experiment to make clean water a business in Haiti's villages. Rural Haitians have always been pretty much on their own when it comes to water, getting it where they can and carrying it home in five-gallon buckets balanced on the head. In many places, local water utilities make the task a bit easier, piping water from streams, springs and wells to public pumps and spigots. Sometimes they disinfect it and sometimes they don't. Often built by foreign charities, the systems are managed by "water committees" comprised of local volunteers. This arrangement isn't unique to Haiti. It's common throughout the developing world, where safe water has been a focus of investment for decades. Between 1990 and 2008, $50 billion was spent globally on rural water projects, according to one estimate. However, development experts now conclude that much of the investment was a waste. There are many reasons. Volunteers left to run the system after the outsiders who construct leave rarely have sufficient expertise. The cost of running a water system for 10 years is three times the cost of installing it. User fees, however, are rarely high enough or collected consistently enough to support ongoing operations. "In almost every village there is some sort of water system, but 50 percent are not working," said Christophe Prevost, a water and sanitation specialist at the World Bank. It only takes three to five years to get the service completely ruined. Haiti now has a new water and sanitation agency, Dinepa, that is not only building large projects but also experimenting with ways to bring professionalism to small ones. The water systems Castel and Narol operate are among 10 in the southern part of the country being built - or rebuilt - with a $10 million grant from the World Bank. The two men do not own the infrastructure, but their pay would derive, in part, from a percentage of the revenue. "The idea is to create a private enterprise," said Michael Merisier, a Dinepa engineer helping oversee the project. In the end, the system should be profitable. But it is not there yet. Castel, Narol and their fellow "professional water operators" one day could be rich. At the moment, however, they are basically working for free and have the anxiety of people running Silicon Valley start-ups.