Buenos Aires, San Nicolas

Buenos Aires is a new community for us to work in. As usual we started by meeting with the community leaders who seemed supportive. Next we planned to hold a socialization with the entire community to introduce Agua Pura and the filter project. As you can from the picture below taken during the socialization we didn’t have our regular turn out.

Socializacion Buenos Aires

Only about 13 or 14 people showed up, many from the same family, out of a community of 70 houses. A number of factors could have influenced the low attendance, including the weather and bad filter publicity. First, it was raining, which always puts a damper on any meeting. Second, a filter owner from Descansadero, San Nicolas had gone to Buenos Aires and told people that the filters didn’t work. What had happened is that he had installed his filter as well as his fathers’ filter himself without Agua Pura staff or Community Agents and inevitably installed it improperly. As a result the filters didn’t work for him or his father and he blamed Agua Pura. This is the first time we have ever had anybody try to install their own filter and then criticize the filter project. Hopefully it is an isolated incident and nothing like this will happen again. We will make sure to re-emphasize the importance of having trained personnel only install filters and if a filter is installed improperly it should be corrected immediately.
As always, community support is necessary for a filter project to function properly in a community. Thus we put the few that attended the socialization in charge of talking to their community to see if they were in fact interested in having filters and create a list of those interested. When we went back they had already created a list of those interested, so we are going to plan another socialization and we expect a much better turn out this time.