A rare post-us-in-Bolivia photo of the project

We've always recognized the importance of images in communicating with people outside of Guarayos about our project. It can be extremely hard to visualize what our employees are working on if one has never seen Ascensión, or, for example, a Biosand filter. For that reason we tried to take as many pictures as possible during our time in Guarayos, and left a digital camera with our employees so that they could continue to send us photos with their updates. Unfortunately, the camera we left broke about a week after we left bolivia, and then repeatedly broke after it was repaired in various local shops... leaving us without any pictures since we left. In september, one of our employees was able to purchase a camera phone, giving us hope that we'd be seeing pictures sooner, rather than later. Unfortunately, his chord to upload pictures onto the computer didn't work very well... so we had to keep waiting. Suddenly in mid-December, without any explanation, we received 2 photos in our inboxes, sent to us by Roberto. Both kind of grainy... probably taken with a camera phone, presumably his. One appears to show the head of the first household in which we installed a filter wayyyy back in April 2007, smiling as she fills a glass from her still-functioning BSF. This one shows part of a family with one of the filters that were installed since we left. The young children will surely reap the, most benefit of the families' newly earned appliance... as it will protect them from the water-borne diseases that would have likely overwhelmed their immune systems and surely forced them to miss school and possibly worse.
Receiving this photo was especially welcome, as Janaki and I can sometimes forget, now that we are in Canada, that the effort we continue to put into raising the money for the project helping administer it is making a tangible difference in real people's lives.