Existing Project Leads to New Project(s)…

For many months Kristi and I have been working together with the community of La Fragosa and the NGO – Agua y Desarrollo Comunitario (ADEC).  Implementation phase (constructing the school water treatment system or CTU and delivering the ceramic water filters) is complete and currently we’re in the education/monitoring phase of the project.  With this project experience under our belt, we are ready to take this project methodology to another rural community, improving access to clean drinking water while providing education on basic health and hygiene practices.

A few days ago, Kristi gave her final charla at the community school in Fragosa.  The topic was hygiene, specifically hand washing.  As usual, the children of Fragosa participated enthusiastically in Kristi’s charla and the accompanying activities.  The school received a supply of hand soap and each child demonstrated the hand washing process that Kristi suggested.  Kristi ends each of her charlas with instructions for the kids to go home and demonstrate what they’ve learned to their siblings and parents.

La Maestra

The little dude in the blue t-shirt is hilarious!

Also on this trip to Fragosa we invited representatives of the municipality of Trinidad to come along and see the project.  While we live in Trinidad, the community of Fragosa falls within another municipality.  For our next manifestation of this project methodology we would like to involve a community within our municipality, Trinidad; therefore, after showing Fragosa to the representatives of Trinidad, we set off for Tascalapa.  The community of Tascalapa is located only 20 minutes from Fragosa and is slightly larger.  The close proximity of the two communities will make it easier for us to combine visits into one trip in the future.

The Trinidad reps were very interested in the entire project methodology and helped explain it to  community leaders and members of Tascalapa.  We met with the teacher at the community school, the patronato, and several community members; all were very receptive to the project and many had already seen the ceramic filters and CTU that we installed in Fragosa.  Our feeling is that we can move this project into implementation much more quickly than we did in Fragosa due to the advance understanding of the project by the community and more importantly, the direct support of the municipality and mayor of Trinidad.  Kristi and I will be presenting a preliminary budget for this project to ADEC very soon.

Additionally, the Trinidad reps were highly interested in the school water treatment system.  Typically, ADEC would fund construction of the CTUs, but we talked with the reps about installing a CTU in each community school throughout the municipality of Trinidad with municipal funds in the future.  We are very excited to pursue the possibility of such a project next week with the mayor directly.