Buena Vista, Atima

Buena Vista is a community that we discovered through a Rotary medical brigade from Minnesota. When they were here last February they went to Buena Vista to do medical work and saw a great need there, considering the community has no electricity or running water. They suggested that Agua Pura install filters there so we did. Unfortunately the community is more than 3 hours away from Santa Barbara so we hadn’t yet been back to do monitoring. A team from the Minnesota Rotary Club was on its way down to Santa Barbara in late October to investigate a water project in Buena Vista with the help of Katie, a Water & Sanitation Peace Corps volunteer. So we took advantage of the fact that Katie needed to go there to do surveying and went to do monitoring. One of the problems we encountered is that many of the filter owners are not able to put water in the filter everyday (which is necessary to maintain the filter in good use) since they do not have running water and thus have to walk up to 1 km to get water. The Minnesota Rotary group is hoping to fund a water system there through a Matching Grant, which should fix this problem. There were also some filters where the water was passing through the filter too quickly due to the fact that the people were performing filter maintenance (mixing up the sand) too frequently. So we reminded them that they only need to do filter maintenance when the filter is full of water and only drips of water come out. We plan to return to Buena Vista within a few weeks to hold another capacitation to remind the community of proper filter use as well as work with Katie, the engineer, to gather data for the water system.

The view from Buena Vista