Too Poor To Boil Drinking Water?

"Still, I was looking for another Ramón all the time, someone with the intelligence and discipline and the desire to break out of his infinitely complicated cycle of deprivation. And still, like an old record caught in a groove, I continued to yell at the mothers with their sick children: “Boil your drinking water; boil your drinking water." It was stupid advice, for now I knew that, being poor, they had no extra pots for boiling and storing water and that their children must die."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)