Life from abroad

This was a hectic week with Rasa going to Danlí to meet up with an Interact group and me to San Pedro Sula for Tom Kennedy’s Rotary group.

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We finished Colorado Barra (15°49′ 29.1″N, 87°18′ 10.2″W) with the school. They only have class about twice a week, when the teacher can make it. We did a puppet show to talk about why clean water is important. In my last entry, you saw the open well where they use to get their water. Now they have water in their homes and school.

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Tom Kennedy brought a group of Rotarians to Honduras to show them his projects in San Pedro Sula. He asked if we could put together a last minute demonstration of the water filters for his group. We brought them to our workshop to build some filters and later that week installed 15 more filters with them. Because of this Tom will now include water filters as part of his 3H grant.

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These ten Rotary Interact high school students were able to raise their own funds in order to purchase, construct and install 20 filters, as well as paying for their own trip to Honduras to do all this. While here they also met school kids at a bi-lingual school, went to a center for street kids and to the squatter town by the town dump. They saw the full gamete of life here; from the well off to the very poorest.

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This is Jose, our water quality monitor in Danlí. The bandage over his eye was from a botfly. These are nasty little insects that ravage the work horses here.

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Since Rasa had the camera this week here are some of her best shots. This woman is 86 years old and still doing her daily chores.

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This is her husband and he likes to watch her doing the chores. They make such a cute couple.

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Robert Kent Jr- robjkentjr@gmail.com
Wat/San/Health Consultant
www.RobRasa.com/hisblog
Cell: +504 9871-5318
Work/Home: +1 (631) 458-1119

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This community is on the Caribbean shore of a manatee filled lagoon. Approximately 35 families live in this far flung village, about a three and a half hour drive from La Ceiba..

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This is called SODIS and it is probably the cheapest and easiest way to make potable water. You only have to have sun, clear water and a plastic bottle. The UV radiation of the sun does the rest if you let is sit out there from sunrise to sunset. The biggest downfall to this is that it does not make the water taste good by removing the organics but it won’t make you sick.

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The poorer houses take there water from shallow wells. Here you see a shower on the very left and a shallow well at the other end of the pipe. The problem with this picture is that after the shower all the water pools to the right and eventually seeps back into the well, along with all the chicken, pig and person contamination.

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Here we are loading the filters into the truck. We can fit about 40 per load and have an arrangement with the municipalities to pay the cost of transportation.

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Here is another great picture demonstrating poor hygiene. You can see the lady cooking bread in the back and the well to the left. Oh, did you see the pigs in the middle?

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This was just a good picture Rasa took

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We ran into an entirely new problem here. It floods frequently so all the houses are up on stilts so we had to make sure to reinforce each house to support a 300lb filter. Having to find planks of wood for each house made for some slow installations.

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Robert Kent Jr- robjkentjr@gmail.com
Wat/San/Health Consultant
www.RobRasa.com/hisblog/
Cell: +504 9871-5318
Work/Home: +1 (631) 458-1119

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