GROW Month: Safe Water Project Update [Summer 2014]

Due to your incredible support of the GROW Program, Children International is able to continue its Safe Water Project in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The community of Flor de Bastión will be forever grateful for the educational opportunities about the importance of clean, safe water. Learn more about how the program is doing after the break.

The purpose of the Safe Water project is to educate families on how to prevent water-borne illnesses. This strategy teaches families how to clean and protect drinking water containers, how to disinfect and store drinking water properly, and how to separate drinking water from cooking water.

Children International hired a new educator for this project in February. He, in turn, presented the project to the community and selected families with the following criteria to benefit from the project: families living in poorest condition, and families that still store water in containers.

It is important to note that most families in the Flor de Bastión Community (including the families participating in this project) do have access to water through city water lines; however, this does not mean that the water is safe to drink or that they know how to purify and safely store their drinking water. Many families do not boil water for drinking; they keep their drinking water in unhygienic containers; and, often, they do not practice appropriate personal hygiene.

Through the pre-KAP surveys, the Safe Water educator determined the health-related topics that should be included in the educational workshops. This information was then compared with the post-KAP surveys to measure the results obtained in the educational workshops that were given.

The Safe Water educator started the first phase of the project with families in several neighborhoods of the Flor de Bastión area. 174 of the 263 people that enrolled completed the educational sessions.

(Click on the images below to enlarge)

To date, the Safe Water educator has carried out the following activities:

• First home visits (pre-KAP surveys)
• Delivery of the Safe Water manual
• 3 workshops for enrolled families
• Second home visits (post-KAP surveys)

The families participated in 3 workshops:

• First educational workshop: Definition of safe water, running water contamination, methods to purify water, use and conservation of water, and diseases that can be contracted from consuming contaminated water.
• Second educational workshop: Conservancy of the water, cleaning of water containers, contaminant factors (garbage, vectors, domestic and farm animals), use of correct dosage to chlorinate water.
• Third educational workshop: Protection of water inside home, diseases caused by the consumption of contaminated water, feedback of the entire information received.

The post-KAP surveys administered after the training workshops were completed indicated the following results:

• The participants learned new preventive health concepts related to water.
• The participants were able to reduce misinformation they possessed about water purification methods.
• The participants reduced misinformation they possessed on proper methods for conserving clean water.

This ongoing project is vital to the good health of hundreds of impoverished families in Guayaquil. GROW and Children International are so happy you can continue your support to help fund this wonderful program for the communities of Ecuador.

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