From left, Greg Jones and Sue Jones, members of the Rotary Club of Jamestown, and Marion Beckerink, past president of the club.

Local Rotarians Sue and Greg Jones described their participation in the Water Filter distribution project in the Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, area supported by the Rotary Club of Jamestown through its Vision Committee process.

Sue Jones began with an overview of the Puerta Vallarta area – the beach, the mountains, the jungle – and described the areas she and her husband Greg visited to distribute water filters. The American and Canadian contingent participants of this program have been led for the past 10 years by Ken Reiser of the West Chester/Liberty, Ohio Rotary Club assisted by his wife Kathy and they have distributed over 5,000 water filters.

The Reisers partner with members of the Puerta Vallarta Sur Rotary Club, Rotary International Tomatlenses Unido (an International Benefit Organization that provides medical equipment and wheelchairs) and the Proyects Agua Limpia Mexico Entrega de Filtros Purificadores de Agua an organization that assists in identifying those who need water purification systems and registers the locals to assure maximum participation and success of the distribution events.

Over the years, the number of Rotary Clubs providing funding for the project has varied from year to year. They have had as many as 14 clubs and they hold four distributions each year, January, February, March and April. Clubs are represented by participants from Ohio, Michigan, Las Vegas, Nevada, Ontario, Alberta,; Onalaska, Wisc.; and Jamestown.

The project is designed to support Rotary’s Area of Focus of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene by providing poor rural communities in Jalisco, Mexico with a long-term solution of sustainable equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water as well as improving community hygiene knowledge, behavior and practices that help prevent the spread of disease. In these rural communities there is limited or no purified water available, therefore many rely on obtaining their drinking water from the area streams and rivers, which are also used by their domestic animals.

One solution to the lack of clean water problem is to buy bottled water for the family. But bottled water is very expensive. A family can easily spend over 50 pesos per day buying bottled water but the average wage for most rural people is only 100 to 200 pesos per day. Therefore, as soon as a child reaches sixth grade and is old enough to work, they are removed from school so they can work to help support the family financially. This water filter project can save the family enough money so they may keep their children in school or keep the family healthy so that the parents can work, and the children can continue their education.

Rotarians travel to these remote rural areas where they assemble and provide gravity fed water purification systems to the local inhabitants, distribute personal hygiene products such as hand soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes. Then individuals are required to attend the onsite water filter use and maintenance training session to ensure the systems provide sustainable clean drinking water for 10+ years. These training sessions also stress the importance of personal hygiene and its effect on personal health, especially hand washing. To promote sustainability and buy-in to clean water and hygiene, everyone is required to provide their own clean 5-gallon bucket in which the volunteers drill a hole and the water filter system is attached.

The program utilizes the “Sawyer International Bucket System” which is used worldwide, especially in remote locations. The system includes water filter tubing and accessories to convert a 5-gallon bucket into a low cost and long-lasting gravity fed water filtration system. The system can filter up to 170 gallons per day for 10+ years with only routine filter back flow maintenance resulting in a long-term solution to clean water that the community members are able to support.

The project also provides the schools in the area with water filter systems, training and an instructional poster on personal hygiene. The products are delivered to each school so the teachers can be instructed on the importance of clean water and personal hygiene and encourage the teachers to add to their curriculum. Having the filters in the school encourages the students to use the filtration systems at home, which promotes positive and healthy behavior changes within the entire family to use and maintain the filtration system.

All of this is to improve opportunities for children through education. The only way to break the poverty cycle is through education. Local medical personnel who treat the people living in the rural area report that one of the major issues is missing school attendance because of sickness due to parasites and bacterial problems. Almost all these problems come from contaminated drinking water, because they do not have clean water systems. This keeps parents from working and children from attending school.

The Joneses attended three distributions this winter in La Cumbre, Mascota, and Campo Acosta, Jalisco, Mexico where nearly 500 filter systems were distributed.