August, 2008

Several Rotarians from Rotary Districts 5770 & 5790 just returned home from the Gracias A Dios area of Honduras.  Everywhere we went, we received outstanding feed back about the filters that we have deployed in their villages.
 
Two years ago we went to the small village of Rondin.  We ask them to tell us what was the biggest problem that they had in the village.  They said it was the bloody diarrhea in the children.  They realized that the bad water was causing it, and they really wanted help with the problem.  We told them we would put a filter in each home.  It took nearly a year to deliver them to the homes.  At one year later, they reported that they were using the filters.  They knew how to use the filters and how to maintain them.  They reported that the filters were helping.
 
On our recent trip, we went to Rondin again.  We ask them how the filters were doing.  We ask if the filters were helping with the diarrhea problem.  The told us that there is no longer any diarrhea in the children.  The problem is cured!  This made us feel really good.  It also confirmed our confidence in the water filters.
 
As we return each year, our clubs ask us if there is still a need for more filters in the area of Gracias A Dios.  We met with the health officials in Puerto Leimpera.  They believe that there is a need for possibly 10,000 more water filters.  We have pledged to continue to do what we can.
 

I want to thank you for all that Pure Water for the World is doing for mankind!
 
Tom Sheriff
 
PS: We are scheduled in the near future to do presentations to both districts 5890 and 5750 about our filter projects in Honduras

Ajay Badhwar, 31, Midland, pours water into a water filter in a rural village in Honduras. He and Midlander Stephen Wildes traveled to the Central American country to see how money donated by local Rotary International clubs was being put to use. The filters provide clean water to families who otherwise would not have access to it.

    Not everyone can count on clean tap water coming from a faucet.

    That was abundantly clear to two local Rotary International club members who visited Honduras to see the impact Midlanders are having in providing clean water to people in need.

    Visiting one-room, dirt floor homes without running water showed the importance of their work, said Midland resident Ajay Badhwar, who returned Monday with Midlander Stephen Wildes.

    Both Midland Rotary clubs have sponsored bio-sand water filters through the Pure Water for the World organization. For about $65, a household can enjoy water that is far more potable than the dirty creeks and wells used in outlying areas of Honduras.

    Wildes said 55,000 children in that country die of waterborne illnesses every year, out of a population of about 7.5 million people.

    "That's more than the population of Midland," Badhwar said. "You've got to do something about it. These are kids."

    Local Rotarians have donated thousands of dollars toward purchasing water filters, which Pure Water installs.

    "There's a bunch of normal people out there like you and I who are out there doing this work and making an impact," Badhwar said.

    Common contaminants in the water include fecal matter — which brings with it bacteria, parasites, worm eggs and viruses — along with organic material and particulates.

    The water filters work by mimicking the process used in nature to purify water, Badhwar said. Water is poured in at the top of the filter, and drains through a layer that decomposes organic matter and eliminates most bacteria and viruses. The water filters through sand, gravel and rock, removing particulates and contaminants before it exits the filter as drinkable water.

    "It struck me as very common sense," Badhwar said. "It's simple and it's cost effective."

    Wildes said the filters provide about 20 liters of water per hour, and about 15,400 filters have been made so far by Pure Water.

    "This is a cost effective, simple resource that millions of people need," Wildes said.

    Badhwar said working with families is "critical" and several return trips are made after installation.

    "It's critical that they learn the elements of personal hygiene," Wildes said, such as to use a latrine, wash their hands, keep animals away from water supplies and how to store clean water.

           In this diagram, drawn by Badhwar, unclean water is filtered through sand, gravel and rocks to removal harmful particles, making it safe for household use. Each filter weighs as much as 400 pounds, which prevents them from being stolen.

    The families pay a small cost for the filter to give them ownership of it, sometimes around $5.

    "It makes them committed to sticking to it," Wildes said.

    The two Midlanders traveled with four other Rotarians from other chapters during the trip. They first went to the capital city Tegucigalpa and then traveled to Danli and Choluteca to see existing filters in use.

    During their trip, Badhwar talked with families who have noticed a difference in health after beginning to use the clean water. Nurses at area clinics noted an improvement as well, he said.

    Wildes said while support from Rotary clubs in Midland and elsewhere is important, the Rotary clubs in Honduras are doing important work with the project as well. Pure Water employs people from the area and use local materials whenever possible to build the filters.

    Wildes and Badhwar also made a stop in Costa Rica to speak at a Rotary district meeting about how to fund similar projects.

    "When local districts look for things to fund, they can do this," Badhwar said.

Children in Honduras gather in a community helped by Rotary Club members, who paid for water filters that have cut the instances of diarrhea and other waterborne illnesses.

    Badhwar has participated in a previous Rotary trip to India, where he helped fight the spread of polio. He said the trips can be exhausting, both emotionally and physically.

    "It's not a vacation by any means," he said.

    The reward is worth the effort, though.

    "It's the right thing to do," he said. "Somebody can live because we donated a couple bucks."

    For more information on Pure Water for the World visit www.purewaterfortheworld.org/

    For more information on Midland's two Rotary International chapters visit www.themidlandrotaryclub.com and www.midlandmorningrotary.org.

Monitoring
As always, monitoring is one of the most important steps in our filter project. This month we dedicated our time to monitoring in 10 of the 14 communities under the Carroll Creek Matching Grant.
Tacaulapa, Tencoa
Ceibita Sur, Ceibita Sur
Santa Ana, Ceguaca
Tierra colorada, Arada
Zorca Arriba, Arada
Zorca Abajo, Arada
Buenos Aires, Concepción Sur
El ocotillo, Arada
El Carmen, Atima
Berlin, Atima

Family with filter in Buenos Aires, Concepcion Sur. The woman second from the left is the head of the family and is hillarious. She attended all of the filter workshops and remembered everything about the filter and asked about Chris Green and David Putt from Canada.

Although we have focused on monitoring this month it doesn’t mean that we have forgotten about installing new filters under the Maine Matching Grant. A number of factors make initiation of filter installation in new communities quite difficult; including the coffee harvest, the rain and Christmas. First, as many of you know, Santa Barbara is a large coffee producing department, and many of the communities that we work with are primarily coffee producers. We are currently in the peak of the coffee harvest, which means that virtually everyone is participating in the harvest and if we tried to hold a community meeting we would probably find ourselves in an empty schoolroom. Second, the rain makes some of the roads to communities impassable by the large truck we use to deliver filters, so new deliveries are stalled. Third, Santa Barbara is in feria right now and Christmas is approaching which means that people are more focused on the holidays and traveling to be with family than hearing about new filters. We plan to reinitiate filter installation in new communities under the Maine Matching Grant in February 2008.

Deparisiting
Initiation of deparasting continues to be a slow process, although we are making progress. In order to demonstrate that there is in fact a need for deparasiting in the communities where we install filters (although we know that there is through experience) we ran lab tests of feces samples of seven beneficiaries of filters from Jimilie.

 We found that each individual had between 1-4 different parasites, the three youngest sampled had the most. According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence and intensity of worm infections peak in children aged ~6-15. This is also the age at which parasites can affect the body most, causing malnutrition, anaemia, stunted growth, and can retard both physical and cognitive development.
We have also made progress working with Dr. Alvaro Perez, a Santa Barbara Rotary Club member to determine which medications we need to buy. The next step is to find the best source for the parasite treatments and get started.

If you would like results from the tests please contact Agua Pura Santa Barbara at aguapurasb@gmail.com for a copy.

 CAWST Workshops

CAWST (Center for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology) is an NGO based out of Canada that supports filter projects with technical information and trainings all over the world. The Agua Pura team was lucky enough to attend a filter workshop facilitated by Andrea Roach. Andrea Roach joined CAWST in 2005 to provide training and consulting services for the Central American region as well as Mexico and Brazil. Andrea is a Professional Engineer and brings to CAWST water and sanitation experience in El Salvador, where she lived for two years, as well as five years of experience in the petroleum industry. She holds a Chemical Engineering Degree from the University of British Columbia and is a qualified CAWST trainer including technical training in Biosand Filtration and other treatment technologies.

The workshop was sponsored by a church from the states that has adopted four communities in south east Santa Barbara (don´t worry, no interference with our project, only support) where they will be introducing filters. It was especially important for Sergio, Mauricio and Allison to attend the workshop, as they have never received outside formal training. Overall, we were able to hone our understanding of the filters and share our experiences with the other attendees.

From left: Andrea Roach, Alliosn O´Donnell, Nineth Mungia

Following the workshop Nineth went to Tegucigalpa to attend the Taller Centro Americano de Implementadores de Filtros Bioarena (Central American Workshop of Biosand Filter Implementers) held by CAWST and International Aid.

Monitoring

Although monitoring is one of the most important aspects of the filter project it has been our tendency to overlook monitoring in favor of installing more filters. However, this month we were able to do monitoring in five different communities under the Carroll Creek Matching Grant including La Espanola, San Isidro, Tacaulapa, Ceibita Sur and Buena Vista. We had the help of four students from La Independencia, a local technical institute, helping us as part of their practicum so things went a lot faster.

We found mixed results among the communities. San Isidro, for example, is a neighborhood about five minutes away from downtown Santa Barbara, however it is right near the garbage dump and the people are very poor and live without electricity. Out of 15 houses that have filters only 7 are functioning. Among the 8 that are not working, 2 no longer want the filters and 6 want us to reinstall the filters. Similarly, only about 60% of the filters are functioning in Ceibita Sur, so we need to reinstall the rest. Tacaulapa, on the other hand, is doing quite well with the majority of the filters functioning as they should. Although it is disappointing to find filters in disuse it shows us how important monitoring is to make sure there are no problems and to correct them as quickly as possible. Or in the unfortunate circumstance that a family no longer wants their filter it is better to remove it so another family can benefit from its use.

Buena Vista, Atima

Buena Vista is a community that we discovered through a Rotary medical brigade from Minnesota. When they were here last February they went to Buena Vista to do medical work and saw a great need there, considering the community has no electricity or running water. They suggested that Agua Pura install filters there so we did. Unfortunately the community is more than 3 hours away from Santa Barbara so we hadn’t yet been back to do monitoring. A team from the Minnesota Rotary Club was on its way down to Santa Barbara in late October to investigate a water project in Buena Vista with the help of Katie, a Water & Sanitation Peace Corps volunteer. So we took advantage of the fact that Katie needed to go there to do surveying and went to do monitoring. One of the problems we encountered is that many of the filter owners are not able to put water in the filter everyday (which is necessary to maintain the filter in good use) since they do not have running water and thus have to walk up to 1 km to get water. The Minnesota Rotary group is hoping to fund a water system there through a Matching Grant, which should fix this problem. There were also some filters where the water was passing through the filter too quickly due to the fact that the people were performing filter maintenance (mixing up the sand) too frequently. So we reminded them that they only need to do filter maintenance when the filter is full of water and only drips of water come out. We plan to return to Buena Vista within a few weeks to hold another capacitation to remind the community of proper filter use as well as work with Katie, the engineer, to gather data for the water system.

The view from Buena Vista

Posted by Agua Pura Santa Barbara at 3:31 PM 0 comments  

Buenos Aires, San Nicolas

Buenos Aires is a new community for us to work in. As usual we started by meeting with the community leaders who seemed supportive. Next we planned to hold a socialization with the entire community to introduce Agua Pura and the filter project. As you can from the picture below taken during the socialization we didn’t have our regular turn out.

Socializacion Buenos Aires

Only about 13 or 14 people showed up, many from the same family, out of a community of 70 houses. A number of factors could have influenced the low attendance, including the weather and bad filter publicity. First, it was raining, which always puts a damper on any meeting. Second, a filter owner from Descansadero, San Nicolas had gone to Buenos Aires and told people that the filters didn’t work. What had happened is that he had installed his filter as well as his fathers’ filter himself without Agua Pura staff or Community Agents and inevitably installed it improperly. As a result the filters didn’t work for him or his father and he blamed Agua Pura. This is the first time we have ever had anybody try to install their own filter and then criticize the filter project. Hopefully it is an isolated incident and nothing like this will happen again. We will make sure to re-emphasize the importance of having trained personnel only install filters and if a filter is installed improperly it should be corrected immediately.
As always, community support is necessary for a filter project to function properly in a community. Thus we put the few that attended the socialization in charge of talking to their community to see if they were in fact interested in having filters and create a list of those interested. When we went back they had already created a list of those interested, so we are going to plan another socialization and we expect a much better turn out this time.

 Las Flores, San Nicolas

Although we finished delivering and installing filters in Las Flores in record time there were still a few loose ends to tie up. We returned to change a few filters with leaks and deliver the remaining water bottles.

This is the only way we can deliver filters in a reasonable amount of time without breaking our backs…community teamwork!

November 29, 2007

We are pleased to provide an update on the Pure Water projects supported by the Rotary Clubs in District 7210.

RI Matching Grant project MG#55144 in Choluteca, Honduras is progressing well. The work there is managed by Choluteca Rotarian Sergio Salinas and a team composed of Peace Corp volunteer, Health Promoter, production supervisor and several people who help manufacture and deliver filters. They are also responsible for training community members and for providing medication for de-parasiting. As on October 31, the team has installed 2317 filters, provided 4450 man-hours of training, and administered de-parasiting medications to 456 individuals, mostly children. This project will be completed in January, 2008 and will deliver a total of 2,800 filters, exceeding the initial goal of 2500 filters by more than 10%. Just imagine, more than 2800 families and many of their children will no longer have to suffer from water borne diseases.

 
A little girl from La Fortunita takes her de-parasiting medication 

RI Matching Grant #61837: Matching Grant application to install 2,300 more filters in the District of Choluteca, Honduras has been approved and we expect to begin work on this project in 2008 after completion of the work under MG#55144.

RI Matching Grant #62078: Another pure water project to install 1800 filters in San Miguel, El Salvador was approved in May 2007. This project led by the Highland Rotary Club in D. 7210 is in partnership with the Presbytery of Iowa. The Presbytery runs a home called Casa Pastoral in the city of Berlin and the church volunteers support about 2200 families living in small villages surrounding Berlin, El Salvador. The families living in this mountainous region do not have access to safe drinking water and they are anxious to receive the filters. We plan to manufacture filters in San Miguel under the supervision of local Rotarians and deliver them to Casa Pastoral for installation in the homes of the families. Highland Club is taking a lead role in this project.

Water source for the villagers near Berlin, El Salvador

The project employee, Julio will be in charge of manufacturing the filters in San Miguel. He has received training in Choluteca, Honduras and the volunteers from Casa Pastoral have been trained to deliver, install, and maintain the filters in the homes of families. Manufacturing of filters has begun and we expect to start delivering filters in the near future.

Julio is manufacturing filters in San Miguel 

Thank you all and your clubs for supporting these projects. Please let us know if you have any questions or would like us to discuss these projects with your clubs.

Yours in Rotary,

Tansukh Dorawala (dorawalast@aol.com) and Stephanie King (applequeen5@aim.com)

This month, we de-parasited our very first communities: El Milagro and Guacimal, Yusguare.  We walked door-to-door with nurses from the health center and not only handed out medications, but also checked on the filters and made sure they were all working (44 of 48 were still in use after more than a year!).

Also, the Honduran team carried out their very first "solo" Community Volunteer training, equipping 11 people from 5 communities to monitor filter use and encourage good hygiene practices.  Evaluations from the training were excellent - I am optimistic that after I leave, the team will continue to train and install volunteers in each community to carry on the good work of advocating improved hygiene and health for many years, long after the Pure Water project has left Choluteca.

And… we broke 2000 filters in the department of Choluteca this month!

Megan Lan
Peace Corps Volunteer, Health Project
Choluteca, Honduras

Dear Friends,

Honduras fell victim to another hurricane.  Early reports gave fear that Hurricane Felix would leave a path of destruction equal to that of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which left 11,000 dead and another 8,000 missing.   Fortunately, Felix did not devastate the country as predicted.  It did leave a path of destruction with most damage resulting from flooding caused by heavy rains.   

Heavy rains create mudslides, soil erosion, damage to roads and bridges, and higher levels of water contamination.  This can lead to increased illnesses and higher death rates.

Pure Water for the World is working in Honduras providing clean, safe drinking water to those who live in the rural, remote regions of this poor Central American country.  Pure Water has projects in areas hard hit by this storm – the departments of Santa Barbara, Copan, Gracias A Dios and Atlantida.

Attached is an email from Tuesday authored by PWW volunteer, Robert Kent.  He wrote: “With all that water coming back out of the drains, it brings all the above muck with it. This water is highly contaminated with trash and fecal coli form, which then mixes back in with our drinking water because there is no pressure in those lines to keep out the muck.”  This condition is in a major city; imagine the conditions in the rural area?

Pure Water for the World will continue to provide clean, safe drinking water to those who need it most.  We can do only this with through the generosity of our friends and supporters.  Please consider giving a special donation at this time. Help us help our neighbors in Honduras.

Sincerely,

Carolyn Crowley Meub,

Executive Director
Pure Water for the World

Robert Kent Jr- robjkentjr@gmail.com
Wat/San/Health Consultant

On Tuesday, we presented our project results to the La Ceiba Rotary club.  They were so impressed with our girls, they asked them to present at the Rotary District's Incoming Board Members' Conference.

In short, everything that has been going on for the last month has ended well. At our local Rotary meeting, Enelida and Keyla did a PowerPoint of what Pure Water has accomplished so far in La Ceiba.  The Rotarians were very pleased and asked if our girls would be interested in doing the same presentation to all the clubs in Honduras at the District conference.  They thought it was important to emphasize what Pure Water and Rotary have been accomplishing by working together and what we could continue to do in the future.  This was a great honor for us not only because it showed that our local club supported us but also because Pure Water was the only NGO invited to present at this conference. 

What we had to say was impressive. With Rotary and Pure Water working together, we have installed over 10,000 filters between six projects in Honduras.  This is over 50,000 people with clean drinking water since 2003.  We have another five project sites coming online with grants this next year in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Plus there is the work that Mike Swirp is doing in Guatemala and our other project in Haiti.  We didn't even touch on the additional benefits of skills and knowledge transfer, job creation, and the grant money injected into the local economies.  All told, I think we have made a big difference in this country and we are only now just gearing up.

The rest of the week we spent moving our filter molds into the new workshop. Willie, the owner, is a retired construction manager that is now raising Tilapia and making cinder blocks.  He lives in one of the communities where we were installing filters and was so impressed with the technology that he practically leapt out of his seat when I first mentioned moving our workshop.  Let's just say at 55, he has more energy than I can possibly keep up with.  So with our new partner, we delivered a contract for him to review and dropped off the molds to get production tests started.  Next week I will spend out there going over the process of full production but I think he will do just fine.

We also went back to El Recreo to drop off the water bottles and to visit Digna.  She was sleeping when we came but her mom said she was doing well.  She also said that none of her 11 kids have had a water sickness since installing the filter and Digna has added some weight back on.  The mom was actually so thankful for the filter, she made her full payment.  Quite a vote of confidence considering how poor she is.  Next week we will return with the Rotarians to conduct stool samples and give out deparasiting meds to everyone who has paid for their filter.  I think this was also a big reason why she wanted to finish paying off her filter.

All in all, a week a great relief and finally some normality. I can't wait to get filters going again next week

Here is Enelida presenting to all 25 Honduran clubs 

Two of the many brothers and sisters of Digna

Bath time for the boys

Delivering the filter molds to Willie's warehouse

Robert Kent Jr- robkentjr@gmail.com
Wat/San/Health Consultant
www.PureWaterForTheWorld.blogspot.com

By Rasa Siminkas Kent  3-29-2007

The taller receiving their first check

The San Juan River and it's amazing sand

Washing the sand with a drop of bleach to kill all the e-coli

Installing our first filter so the taller workers can now have clean water

This is an example of the four layers of sand that is used as our filter media 

Robert J Kent Jr