December of 2013, we (Bridges of St. Mark) received an unexpected email from an associate professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Thanh H. (Helen) Nguyen. She explained how she and her students were, “…water treatment engineers. We can help the people to use the filters more effectively. I plan to take a group of Illinois students to Saigon in May for some field work… We worked with communities in Guatemala and Nepal to install the [biosand water] filters. I just hope that our expertise may be useful for your mission”. Fortunately for us and our friends at Rach Suc, SHE SPEAKS FLUENT VIETNAMESE. She and her students were to arrive in Can Tho just as the biosand water filters arrived at the end of May.
Louis Lugo, a volunteer from Bridges of St. Mark, has been in Can Tho since the end of March 2014 working with Father Nguyen Khac Minh (Father Michael). Among many other things, they worked very hard get ready for the shipment of the water filters and preparing for the visit of Professor Helen and her students.
Bright and early on Wednesday, May, 28th, Professor Helen and her students arrive to do their work. In an email Wednesday evening she writes,
Dear Randall:
We spent the whole day with Louis in the community today. You are right, he is really a big help. We were able to visit 4 families with filters and Nhung. Louis told us that there is one man who is using the filter properly so we went to visit him first. This man was very creative in collecting his water in such a way that the filtered water should not be recontaminated. He liked the taste of water and he also gives his neighbors the filtered water. We think that we should try to get this man to educate other people in the community to use the filter properly. Then we went to see 3 more families. One family has only 1 single man who used the filter but did not give the filtered water to anyone so he only put water through it once every 2 days. His filter is still functioning but not as well as others. Three out of 4 family put tap water through the filters because they did not trust the tap water even though they pay for the tap water. They said that the filtered water tasted better than the tap water. This is still fine because they said they don’t need to buy bottle water.
Now, here is the story of the day. We visited the last family who lives right near the church. The family is very poor, just a mother and a son. She is unemployed. She does not have money to pay for tap water so she used RIVER water. She takes river water, coagulate it using a local source of alum and then use the filter for the pretreated water. Her family uses this filtered water to drink because they cannot afford other options. They like the taste of the water and she said they did not have stomach upset. I think this is exactly the people that we want to help and what this woman does is right scientifically.
I talked to Louis about our experience that the community needs to own the technology. He said Nhung is probably the person who can help because Father Michael is just too busy. So we went to Nhung’s family. I sat down and talked to her. I brought with me 2 students: one is currently a national guard who helped US community through disaster, another served on the peace corp in Africa. Both of them contributed ideas to Nhung on how to involve the community. Nhung said she would come to church to meet with us again tomorrow… (Nhung is the young lady used in the training video utilized in the community)
…I really put Louis to work a lot today. He was the one who took me around on the motorbike the whole day. Louis is really committed to help the community. He is also very smart and it was easy to talk to him.
I will update you more tomorrow.
Best regards Helen
After the 2nd Day Working at Rach Suc she writes:
Dear Randall:
We went back to community again today. We showed Louis, Nhung, and some people there the testing results from yesterday. For the people who used tap water to put it through the filter, their tap water and the filtered water are both clean of coliform and E coli. For the poor lady, who uses river water, there is a big improvement. River water is full of E coli and coliform. Her pretreated water still has coliform and E. coli. Her filtered water is clean, ready to drink. We discussed with Louis and suggested to Father Michael that we need to give the filters to people who cannot afford tap water. We got the sands and gravels from the local source. We cleaned them with Louis and Nhung. We packed a filter for a lady, who has been helping the church. We did a little troubleshooting to get the flow rate right as in the instruction sheet from the company. The total cost for the sands and gravels is $2 per filter. We left Louis with the weights for each layer based on the local materials. My students also did two posters to show to the community how to choose the sand and the testing results. We are hoping that these posters will be showed to the community after the mass on Sunday. Louis took video and pictures of all steps.
I feel happy to accomplish our plan of leaving the community with a way forward. We will be back to the states a day after Louis. The filters that you sent are supposed to arrive at the church this weekend. We also left our testing sets with Louis who will work with Nhung again so she can implement it when needed.
Best regards
Helen
Many Thanks to Professor Helen Nguyen and her students. What a tremendous help to the Rach Suc community.
Learn more about Professor Helen by visiting:
https://cee.illinois.edu/directory/profile/thn