Fight childhood disease with safe drinking water

Dear Friends and Supporters:

It’s been an exciting Spring for our organization!  With your financial support and encouragement we’ve been busy teaching volunteers from different organizations our methods of water testing and purification, even giving on-line workshops, and now we’re lining up several service trips  for this summer and fall.  It looks like it’s going to be a great year!  Here’s just some of what we’ve been doing:

A Community College here in Portland, Oregon is home to SEED, a two year U.S. State Department program for students from Latin America who are studying  Environmental Technology.  They come from poor rural communities and are learning practical water and sanitation procedures that they can take back to help their families and neighbors.  Agua Pura was asked to help their program by demonstrating some of the  techniques that we advocate.
 
We had a very interesting workshop with these students, they all are very intelligent and curious and had lots of great questions.  In addition to their studies we showed how to make solar stoves and “rocket stoves” and each student got to make a WAPI to take home. To graduate from their program they needed to make a thesis presentation of an technology appropriate to their communities, and several students included our work in their presentations.  We also agreed to return later this summer for another more in depth program for the second year students on water testing for bacterial contamination.

We think these students will be great ambassadors and advocates for clean water and for Agua Pura when they return home, and we will continue to support them however we can!

Next month Agua Pura will be returning to Panama to meet with the indigenous Wounaan tribe we visited in January and present our training program in water testing and water purification.  Health workers from the different native communities will test their drinking water and we will work with families to help make their water safe.  It should be an interesting trip and we’ll report later how it went.

And -- We’ve just agreed to go to Peru this October!  Agua Pura will travel with another non profit, Health Bridges International, to help train local health workers in Northern Peru. This will be our first trip to Peru, but like our other projects we plan to start a long term relationship with the communities there.

AGAIN, IT IS YOUR VALUED SUPPORT THAT MAKES OUR WORK POSSIBLE, AND WE COULD NOT CONTINUE WITHOUT YOUR HELP.  THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Tom Carter
Executive Director

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