Thursday, July 9, 2009

Day 6: Ray Cantwell

We met with Dr. Ray Cantwell, who has worked with water treatment before coming to Cambodia. He has been here for 2 years already with his wife.

Briefly, he first talked to us about water treatment. We asked specific questions about the BSF and what kinds of issues still exist. We arrived at a couple of interesting areas. While BSF achieves 30-40 liters of water output per day, improvement in health can hardly be measured. Having diarrhea may be caused by food sanitation, hygiene, and perhaps only 20-25% to clean water. That might be true and $20-25 of the $60 cost to build a filter is given to the staff to work and educate the villagers about these topics. Ray claims that it is possible to have more in-depth understanding of hygiene and safe storage practices as an objective.

Lastly, he also mentioned something Viriya also brought up: how could we possibly get more sand for the filters. Right now it's done by hiring 3 people for $3 per day rotating a sift all day, every day. This is a possible avenue as well.

Children on the bank across from Cafe Fresco, where we had coffee.

Chenla Restaurant, #13 Street 278, is a non-profit restaurant which employs poor students from the Phnom Penh area. Great Cambodian mains from US$2-3 and large fruit shakes for less than US$1. Go for a meal and enjoy the after dinner conversation with the enthusiastic servers who like to practice their english! The food wasn't great but it is for a good cause!

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