Fight childhood disease with safe drinking water

Dear Friends,

It’s the Christmas Holiday season again, time to look back at the year’s accomplishments and forward to sharing happy, satisfying holiday times with family and friends. We hope that your Christmas season will be happy as well.

Agua Pura has completed another great year with successful programs in Mexico and in Honduras as well as continuing our work with the Latin American students at our local community college. The vital support of families such as yours allows us to continue our important work. Let me share a little of what we accomplished this year and our goals for the future.

Newspaper reports often give an impression of violence and danger in Latin American countries, while that is true at times of course, when we visit there we find instead peaceful, friendly, welcoming communities with families eager to learn ways to protect their health. Wherever we have traveled over these last years, in big city slums and rural villages, we have been invited by the local people to share our information, to participate with them in improving their communities and asked back to continue our work.

Last May we returned to Chiapas State in southern Mexico to continue our program there with Amextra, a large Mexican non profit.  As before, we trained their staff in our water purification methods and then went with them to the communities they serve to help them share the ideas with the families there. We provide lots of educational materials in Spanish, but it was interesting to also see our program presented in some of the different Mayan languages spoken in that area.

In the fall, we were in Honduras in a beautiful, peaceful mountain town working with a new partner, Project Global Village. By working with local non profits we ensure our programs are more successful and will be continued after we return home. Agua Pura helped their staff learn how to test drinking water for contamination and demonstrated simple ways that families can purify and protect their water. We also built and tested various kinds of simple stoves that families can use for cooking as well as water purification.

You can read more about these trips on our website: Agua Pura.

Here at home, an interesting and satisfying connection we have made in the last years has been with an international program based at our local community college, Mt. Hood CC. Scholarship students from Central America and the Caribbean study environmental programs for two years before returning to their home countries to become community leaders and to implement projects they have developed here. Agua Pura has been proud to offer training in water purification and sanitation to these students. Last summer we were able to visit the home community of one student and offer our help with bringing clean water to them.  See more pictures of the students on our website and our Facebook page.

What are our goals for next year and the future? With your help and support we plan to continue our work with families throughout Latin America to provide safe drinking water. We want to return to places we have been and to reinforce programs we have started. Also, as our college student friends return to their home countries we look forward to working with them to support their work. We see these young men and women as ambassadors, bringing their new knowledge to their communities, and we hope to be there with them.

Can we rely on your support again next year? We receive many requests for help and your contributions are what make it possible for us to respond. You know that we are all volunteers and 100% of your donations goes to helping families have safe drinking water. This year would you consider a recurring monthly contribution? A steady predictable source of funds will help us plan for future programs and means so much to us! Also, Global Giving is matching new automatic monthly contributions till the end of the year, doubling your impact.

Thank you for your support! Together we are bringing clean water to the people, one family at a time.

Tom Carter

Our bags are packed, and we’re ready to go!  Next Saturday Agua Pura heads to Honduras to present another of our programs in clean water and sanitation.  It will be the largest program we have ever done and we’re excited about it.  We are going to train community leaders from a number of small rural towns in simple, inexpensive, modern methods of water testing and water purification.  We’ll demonstrate different ways to purify water and simple ways to keep it clean, then we’ll go with them back to their communities and help them pass the message on to their neighbors.  
  Hand washing is also an important part of staying healthy but in many communities water is scarce  and so we’ll help families set up stations in their homes where they can wash without wasting precious water.  We’ll also be demonstrating simple stoves that can be used to pasteurize  water and also cook meals using waste biomass fuels instead of cutting down trees for firewood.
It will be a busy couple of weeks, but I think we can pull it off!   It would not have been possible however without your support.   All the supplies and training materials we’re taking are expensive, but your donations have helped purchase them and you can be proud of what you’ve done. We established a special fund here on Global Giving just dedicated to this project and many of you contributed to support us: “Clean Water for 300 families in Honduras.” That fund is now closed but you can still contribute on our ongoing regular site “Clean Water for 1000 families in Latin America”.  On our next posting we will have lot of photos from this new trip and we hope you will continue to follow our work, and we look forward to hearing from you in the future
Tom

Links:

• Follow our progress on our website