Fight childhood disease with safe drinking water

Greetings friends and supporters. Water contamination continues to be a major concern for many people around the world, especially in places like Haiti.   Despite the difficult conditions there we continue to do good work in Haiti with the help of our partners in Haiti. Late last year they completed a seminar on how water gets contaminated and then how to treat the water to make it potable. They demonstrated water disinfectant treatment during the seminar.

Together, we are saving lives, by reducing the risk of gastrointestinal diseases that can become fatal for small children without strong immune systems. For normal adults, these diseases can be as mild as a nuisance to feeling sick for a short time, and then usually a full recovery is made. For small children, these diseases in contaminated drinking water can be a severe illness and possibly death.

Thank you for your continued support of Agua Pura Para El Pueblo. We are grateful to be working with you to improve the lives of children in Haiti and throughout Latin America.

What can we do in Mexico?

That is the question we are asking ourselves.  What can we do to help the people in Mexico obtain clean drinking water so their children don’t get sick?  We traveled to Mexico City to meet with previous groups we had worked with in the past to see if there might be a future of continuing our work together.  

In Mexico City, we met up with two organizations that we had worked with in the past, Un Kilo de Ayuda, and Red Caza de Lluvia.  Un Kilo de Ayuda focuses on nutritional deficiencies in families, especially with children, to promote healthy food and water access.  They even do similar water testing that we do.  After seeing several of their projects, we left them with testing materials and WAPIs to continue water testing and providing Pasteurization Indicators.
The focus of Red Caza de Lluvia is to collect rain water with a unique device that diverts the First Flush of the roof collection to waste so that the following water is cleaner and not as contaminated.  We hope to continue working with both of these organizations more in the future.

 with another organization in Mexico in the southern department of Chiapas.  We went to a community called Generation 95 where there were two communities that we tested the water from.  Most of the community members spoke a Mayan language called Ch’ol so we talked in English and Spanish and a member of the community translated our information into Ch’ol.  

The results of the testing of the two communities was a moderate risk for one of the communities and a high risk of contamination for the other community.  We were able to share ways to treat the water and demonstrated how to use a WAPI to verify the water was safe to drink.

We look forward to working with these organizations some more as time and opportunity provide.  There is always a lot of need and we appreciate those that help us to help provide clean drinking water to as many people as we can.  Disease knows no countries borders.  The need is in all countries.

Figure 2 The sample from Arroyo El Encanto had various red colonies and one blue colony on the Petri film.  The 10 ml tube was yellow colored and was slightly fluorescent so was marked positive.  High risk level.  The sample from Ursala Galvan had a few red colonies and no blue colonies on the Petri film.  The 10 ml tube turned yellow, but did not fluoresce.  Moderate Risk level.