Hello all.

So it has been two and a half weeks since I arrived here in the Dominican Republic. This is a very interesting country, and it is great to be out of the United States and see things from a different perspective. There is a great mix of culture here; many influences from all over the world.  The ceramic potter that we have been working alongside, Rhadames, makes tall sculptures of women in long intricate dresses and hats, but these figurines have no faces due to the fact that the cultural mix is so great.

I came down here to join my good friend Brad, who has been working for FilterPure for the last two and a half years. My first two days of work were at the ceramic water filter factory that FilterPure built on Rhada's land, working with a group of about 20 people from all over the United States. All of these people are landscapers who either work for, or distribute materials for Aquascape, a company centered around building waterfalls and water related landscape features. A large pit was dug at the filter factory before I arrived in country, and was filled with "aqua blocks" that will fill and hold 15,000 gallons of water when the rains come next month. Pumps are being installed and will transport the water throughout the community; there is currently a quite severe absence of water in the small "campo" of Higuerito where the factory is located.

After finishing the rainwater harvesting tank, our focus shifted back to water filters. There is currently an inventory of roughly 2000 filters in storage. We have been organizing and moving boxes of these filters to get an accurate count. The area where the filters were stored had a leak, and so we had to inspect many of these filters because the boxes were soggy and wet. After removing all the compromised boxes we have about 300 filters that passed our inspection. After assembling them in 5 gallon buckets with spigots, they are ready to go out the door to communities. We distributed 100 filters to a work camp in Santo Domingo, and another 100 to the extremely poor community of Bayacanes, about a half hour outside of Santiago. We have finished inventory, still with about 250 filters ready to go out the door to those that need them. There are two large orders in the works, each for 1000 filters, so there will be alot of work to do in the next couple months.  We won't begin production of new filters until all the filters in storage are off the property and into communities.

Now that we have finished the inventory, our focus will be on cleaning the factory (its a concrete structure that still needs to be completed - very much third world) establishing sound production methods and working on getting the remaining filters out the door and filtering water.

Rhadames instructing how to use and clean filters

Filter recipients in Santo Domingo

Kids from Bayacanes - some of the happiest kids I've ever met.

The kids helped us distribute the filters.

Thumbs Up

View from the mountaintop in Jarabacoa

View from the restaurant on the mountaintop