Work update and pics
As some of you already know, we’re finally in our own place! It’s great to be on our own again (after 5 long months). We are living pretty simply with very little furniture (only 1 plastic table and 2 chairs and 2 thin foam mattresses for the floor that we sleep on) but we couldn’t be happier. Our next big purchase will be a couch, a few more plastic chairs, a bed, and maybe eventually, a tv. Send me an email if you want to see pics of the house.
I am sitting here on my plastic chair on a cool (low 70s) Thursday evening thinking of something to blog about so I thought I’d talk a bit about the sand filters that Agua Pura and Rotary International have been installing all over Honduras. I’ve tagged along three times now with employees from Agua Pura and an American environmental engineering student who is here doing a third-party evaluation of the filters. In the department of El Paraíso, around 9,000 filters have been installed. Each filter costs about $27 and is installed inside a family’s home. The family is responsible for coming up with 200 lemps (about $10) of the cost. Check out the pic below to have an idea about what it looks like.
Through the third-party evaluation, they have been finding out that many people are not using the filters correctly or at all. (Ahhh…the joys of development work!). The problem is that the 4 employees (all Honduran) of Auga Pura in Danlí cannot possibly oversee the proper use and maintenance of 9,000 filters. So what we would like to bring to the drawing table is training the already established community leaders in the monitoring of their community’s filter use and general hygiene and come up with some way of reporting back to Agua Pura so they can keep a better eye on things.
It’s so interesting to see all that goes into a project like this. This is the first NGO that I’m really getting to see a lot of the inner workings of. After the several trips we’ve been on to communities to either do water samples or present the idea of bringing filters into a community, the environmental engineering student (and now a public health student who’s also here for 6 weeks doing an internship) and I have to have coffee and debrief to process everything that is involved. Some of the issues that have come up are:
If a community already has a water system, do they really need household sand filters or are there other methods of water purification that would be more suitable?
If a community has a system and was previously treating their water at the tank with chlorine and have now stopped chlorinating because chlorine doesn’t work with the sand filters, what do the people do in the community who don’t have the sand filters?
Are the sand filters being provided because it’s really in the best interest of the community or because numbers are needed to report back to the administration so funding and jobs of the employees can be secured and foreign donors can feel good about themselves?
If filters are being installed to provide clean drinking water but not much is done in the way of education on general hygiene (washing hands, wearing shoes, keeping animals out of house, keeping trash covered, use of latrines, etc.) people will still get sick so how do you manage that (staff, funding, etc.)?
I’m neither for nor against the filters…just bringing up some of the questions that I imagine arise when working with any NGO or similar development agency.
Anyway, below are a few scenes from the campo on one of the visits I went on with Agua Pura. To check out Agua Pura´s explanation for why they´re working in Honduras click on: http://www.purewaterfortheworld.org/our-projects/why-honduras/
Corn sitting on someone´s kitchen floor ready to be milled to make tortillas. 
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