Vidal and I replaced a filter in Ingrid's house in El Tizate. Ingrid had an older model of the filter that took up too much space in her house, so we exchanged it for the newer, smaller model.

Ingrid is a single mom with two small girls. We call her house, "La casa de Clifford", because they have a dog named Clifford that liked to try to drink from the filter.

A couple of weeks before we went out to Ingrid's house, I took the microscope out to take a look at a water sample from the river at El Tizate. This river receives raw sewage from all the villages upstream and downstream, as well as the outfall from a pig processing plant upstream. Sometimes the rivers runs a reddish-brown color from the pig plant. We were there in El Tizate again today and I was reminded of the contamination level from the stench arising from the river.

Ingrid and her girls got to see the microbes in the water sample from the river that I showed them under the microscope. To say they were amazed would be a great understatement. I was interested in seeing the variety of protists in the water...quite an interesting lot.

Vidal and I went with Raul (from a village near Chimaltenango) to place three filters at the houses of his extended family. Raul was very good about coming to our site in El Tizate to help with the construction of the filter. His wife came with him to help sift the gravel and sand for the three filters.

Raul's house is in a village that is a little difficult to get to. We had to use 4x4 to get up the drive from the dirt road in front of his house. He and Vidal did most all the work of hauling the filters (very heavy) up to the houses and filling them with the gravel and sand. The filters will go a long way in keeping Raul's 5 children healthy and his parents and other family that live next to him.

In Novemeber professor Maricruz Alvarez graciously offered time out of her busy schedule at the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala City to meet with me. Ostensibly our meeting was to discuss the possibility of collaborating on my research project, but I now know that the project is not feasible in Guatemala for a variety of reasons.

Nevertheless, Maricruz had some very valuable insights into water project implementation in Guatemala. One issue is the use of chlorination as a disinfection process. She told me an interesting story about a research project she did with the CDC using chlorination.

The CDC Safewater System is a sustainable water treatment process for developing countries. Maricruz was involved in a field test of the system in Guatemala City. The system calls for chlorinating water collected in a specialized container. During the field test she and her colleagues found instances chlorine concentrations of at least twice the recommended level in treated water, and yet these samples still contained bacteria. The research team was a little baffled by this until they realized that the users were not chlorinating the water until very shortly before the research team appeared to do the testing. The users would dump excessive amounts of chlorine in the water in order to make it appear as if they had been complying with the norms for the study.

The users were not regularly chlorinating the water because the taste of chlorine was disagreeable to those who wanted to drink the water. This is a difficult problem to overcome here. We gringos are accustomed to chlorine taste in the water, but Guatemalans do not like it. This has an impact on our biosand filter project, because it is recommended that post-filtration water be chlorinated as a secondary security measure and to provide a residual protectant in the water.

Forrest and I are currently reassessing the chlorination issue and steps we can take to address the problem. One possibility is to use a mixed oxidant solution from an electrolysis unit (similar to the MIOX backpacker units). This opens a whole new can of worms however. We will be devoting more time to this issue in the future.

Many thanks to Maricruz for her insights!

Vidal and I went out to Santiago Zamora (about 30 minutes outside of Antigua) to replace a broken filter in October. This was one of the concrete filters that cracked. It was clear that the household needed more training in the use of the filter as well as general hygiene and health training.

The house did not have a door on it and animals were free to walk in and out of the house, carrying anything inside with them, and leaving their poop inside, too. This is a common problem in many of the villages I've been in. In the future, I'm going to require that the house have a door, or some way to keep the animals out, in any household that we place a filter.

The lady at the house did not fully understand the principles of operating the filter, either. We will need to provide for more training in the villages to address this. I am recommending that we train the leaders of the local church in the operation/maintenance of the filter, so they can monitor the use in the villages.