On January 14th-17th all of the Agua Pura para el Mundo projects from Honduras met in Siguatepeque for the annual APPM meeting. The staff from Santa Barbara, Choluteca, Copan, Tela, La Ceiba, Trujillo and a representative from Danli were all able to attend. It was a wonderful opportunity for Mauricio, Sergio and Allison to meet the staff from different projects since this was the first national meeting they had attended. It was also an opportunity to meet the new APPM Administrator, William.
Maria & WilliamWe started with presentations from each project to share our current progress, experiences and lessons learned. It was interesting to see how different each project is and how approaches work in different regions even within Honduras. For example, some projects receive wonderful support from the Secretary of Health and are able to work with them to do all their water testing. Also, aspects such as terrain and occupation of the filter beneficiaries make a difference. There is a new project starting in Tela, on the north coast, and they plan to install filters in some communities with no road access, which adds a whole new element to transporting a 300+ pound cement filter. Also, the projects vary widely in their duration and the number of filters to be installed.
We also learned some important lessons from the other projects, such as effective ways to collect counterpart payments. Each family that receives a filter pays a ¨counterpart¨of 150 lempiras (about $8). During our Carroll Creek grant we gave the filter beneficiaries two months to pay this counterpart. This didn’t work out for us very well, because people would never end up paying. Now, Sergio has to return to past communities to collect money. Other projects collect the counterpart money either before or during installation of the filters with much higher success, so we plan to follow suite and do the same.
Despite the differences between projects we all agreed that the Community Agents training and thorough monitoring are indispensable.
Next, we received a presentation from Lucy Vallejo, a representative from Handals, which sells products for water analysis. She reviewed basic information about water quality and contamination and demonstrated how to use various water testing products. Every APPM in Honduras does microbial testing for fecal coliformes, however we all use somewhat different equipment and laboratory techniques. Over the past few months we have been having some trouble with our water analysis in Santa Bárbara so it was an important opportunity for all of us to compare what works well and what doesn’t. We are currently considering how to improve our quality of water testing by changing laboratory techniques and/or investing in new lab equipment.
We also had the pleasure of talking with a representative from the Secretary of Health about epidemiology in Honduras as it relates to water contamination.After hearing from Handals and the Secretary of Health, we moved on to internal administrative issues within APPM Honduras. Although it was not the most exciting part of the workshop, it may have been the most important. We were able to work together to come up with a uniform reporting method that we could all agree on. From now on every project in Honduras will use the same format to report project progress and financial expenditure. We also created a new monitoring questionnaire to measure the success of filter use within each project and with the help of Katie Strass, a Water & Sanitation engineer with the Peace Corps, we were able to create a database to analyze all the data.
Maria & Nineth working on formating
William, the new administrator for APPM, then continued by talking about annual planning. Since each project has specific goals and deadlines it is important that we have a plan to be able to achieve our goals and meet our deadlines. Currently the Santa Barbara team is working on establishing our goals, identifying the activities that will allow us to achieve those goals and how we will measure our success. We are also working on the elaboration of a 3-6 month calendar that will help us stay on track with each of our Matching Grants.
From left: Mauricio, Nineth, Sergio, Allison
We were thankful to get a total of 1,100 doses of anti-parasite medicine donated to us from Robert Turner and Agua Pura. Robert Turner is a college student from Idaho who visits Honduras multiple times a year to work with filters and do deparasiting. He gave us 500 doses of Albendazole in tablets and 200 doses of Albendazole in suspension. Maria also gave us 400 doses of Albendazole in tablets. We were able to use these medications to do our first deparasiting in Jimilile, Arada. Overall things went very smoothly and quickly. Albendazole is straight forward, safe and easy to administer. Babies from 1-2 years of receive 200 mg in liquid form and everyone above 2 years of age receives 400 mg in liquid or tablet form depending on their age. There is no weighing necessary and the entire amount is given all at once. The tablet is chewable and tastes surprisingly good (Allison, our Peace Corps volunteer, ate one), little kids had no problem sucking on it. Although the tablet is chewable and tasty many of the women that came in to get the medication were either scared or embarrassed to eat it in front of us. We would give it to them and tell them to eat it and they would just hold it in their hand and smile and say they would eat it later. We preferred they all take the medication in front of us so we could insure that they wouldn’t use it or give it to somebody else. It took quite a bit of coaxing for some of the women, but we got all of them to eat it on the spot.
The liquid form also tastes good (Chris, our last Agua Pura volunteer, had some) but it can be more of a challenge to get the babies to drink it. They have a tendency to cry and spit it up.
This baby is surprisingly cooperative.
