2.5.10

Here I am, just now remembering my new year’s resolution to keep people back home better updated on Ecuadorian life. Hopefully there will be more reading here soon for those interested.

Lately at work, we’ve been busy with new community projects and we just finished a water testing in the communities that we’ve already been working with who have rain water collection tanks installed. As part of the critieria for receiving a grant, the granting agency wanted proof of how the community’s health improved with the installation of these rain water collection tanks, so we tested the tank water. Let me give you some context for these communities first:

Most remote communities in the jungle here do not have running water. (Many now are just having electricity installed). But because of no running water, most families rely on river water as their main source of water for bathing, washing, cooking and drinking. Based on brief interviews we did in the communities, the majority of families do nothing to purify this water before drinking or cooking with it. Naturally, the rivers are contaminated. I haven’t heard of any effective sewage treatment facilities in the Oriente region. Here in Tena, all drains lead directly to the river. (Which has definitely made me think twice about fun Saturday afternoons swimming in the river…) And it’s the same throughout the region.

So our tests wanted to prove that with effective cleaning and purification of the tank water (we provide guides and workshops on cleaning the tanks and purifying the water) this water should be safe and healthy to drink- and much more so than their river water. Most of our results did show that. The rivers in the community had dangerously high levels of E.coli bacteria and other bacteria and the mothers in the community reported that their kids were sick with diarrhea or other gastrointestinal problems about every 2 weeks. So far about 85% of the tanks are safe to drink out of (those that are unsafe can be remedied with a good cleaning).

Doing this project also gave me and my coworker the unique chance to see every beneficiary’s home and talk more personally to each family (we usually just have community meetings with them). While this included a lot of walking through the hot jungle, I like now that I can more easily put names to faces of the families we work with. Most were very generous, feeding us lunch (one day lunch at each house…) or giving us a drink or fresh fruit. But we are most indebted to our guides for this project. As houses are spread out, some deep in the jungle, it was absolutetly necessary that we have a community member accompany us and show us who lives where.

When we arrived to collect the first round of samples in one of the communities, we found out that 2 young kids had recently died there. The father of one of the kids told us his extremely sad story about how his son was sick with stomach pain for a few days so they took him to the hospital and then somewhat mysteriously, he died soon after. They were waiting for cause of death results but the Ministry of Health government officials responded by giving community members jugs to hold water and bleach to purify it while they waited for results. It was hard to listen to what this family went through and to know that it happens everyday here due to the lack of something so basic as clean drinking water.

Here in Tena, I have running water but I don’t drink it straight from the tap. Government officials in Tena recently said the water is perfectly safe to drink but I don’t believe it and neither do my Tena friends. We ran a bacteria test on tap water just out of curiosity and it indeed did come back with high levels of E.coli bacteria. So I’m going to continue to boil my drinking water and maybe only keep my head above water when I spend fun Saturday afternoons at the river…