Water Struggles and Salsa Solutions

The culture shock from immersing ourselves into a developing country was immediate, but today brought realizations we never before expected. We began our day--after having yet another scrumptious breakfast (shout out to our cook Adele on that one)-- by driving to an elementary school to listen to a presentation on water filters; all in Spanish, of course.

While we Americans are consumed with materialistic wants, the people of our impoverished neighborhood are concerned with unpurified water that’s extremely harmful to their health. After being read a story on the importance of clean water, we briefly watched how to build Ecofiltro, a ceramic and plastic water purifying system. With this information--that frankly was difficult to understand with our language barrier--we left for local homes to build Ecofiltros for them.

Enveloped by blue skies and stunning mountains, these fly-covered homes were (barely) held up with torn tarp and cheap metal. Adorable, tiny children ran past us while we stood in the “houses” with pets ranging from cats and dogs to roosters and rabbits. Each of us was given our own family to build the water purifier for, and explain how it is to be used. To give you the gist, we all were driving that struggle bus working that one out. Communication was a killer, but the families were very kind about the issue.

After all the homes were supplied, we wound down the day by getting our sexy on. We took salsa dancing lessons, wiggling uncomfortably to snappy Spanish music with an instructor that I’m pretty sure said “One, two, three, sexy!” and whistled at us more than I will ever grasp. Let’s just say once we warmed up to it, it was a quality night.

 Anyways, I could go on and on, but I have a game of Euchre to attend to, so thanks for reading, folks! 

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