Please Note: The internet at the Homestay is not working so we walked into town to post this blog, we are committed to our followers. We have tons of pictures and some really great videos we want to post, but at this time we cannot. We hope to post pictures when we are in Lao Cai waiting at the train station on Tuesday afternoon.
Tomorrow is our second and last day of teaching at Bao Nhai Primary School B. Below is information about the school and our water install.
Bao Nhai Primary School B is set high in the mountains of the Lao Cai Provence in northern Vietnam. The school serves multiple minority group children from tribes such as the Hmong and Zoa people, as well as Vietnamese children. Rocky dirt roads lead to the school where some students walk as far as four miles to attend school. The primary school has a small handful of mentally handicapped students who are given the chance to master each grade before being moved up. The headmaster and staff are very dedicated and hard working often staying late to help minority students who may miss classes due to helping their families with farm work. A new water filter is now up and running (see Brian’s post) at the school bringing clean safe drinking water to over 125 students and 22 staff. The students are very attentive and quite while being taught but enjoy the games and silliness just as much as American children. While waiting for our lessons to begin the students sang several popular songs.
Installing the water filter at Bao Nhai primary B: The water filter installation went very smoothly. The entire system consists of a large cement cistern, one 400 liter water tank, a supply line from the cistern to the tank, and two water lines from the tank that connect to two Reverse Osmosis (R.O.) water filters. The cement cistern is filled by runoff from the mountainside near the school. However, this water is deadly. So, the water filters we chose remove nearly everything from the water, including viruses and arsenic (both of which occur naturally in the water here). Clean water in Vietnam is a huge problem. Most of the water is not drinkable so most people boil the water. However, this does not remove everything harmful (i.e. arsenic). Water-born illness is the second leading cause of death in Vietnam. We are beginning to address this problem with the R.O. filters.
A plumber that we hired installed the water tank ahead of time. It looked great! It was a professional installation! We were impressed. We placed the two water filters into two rooms the administration had chosen ahead of time and hooked them up. We didn’t have any power so we could not test the filters. Hopefully power will be restored on Monday and we can test the filters. This leads us to consider installing solar panels so the filters will work during a blackout. Once the filters were in place, Brian and a local farmer got to work on burying the supply line. One hour later and two gallons of sweat, the line was buried. It was clear that the local farmer spends all his days working with the dirt, so he completed 2 feet on ditch per minute verses Brian’s 1 foot per minute. Stay tuned, we will update you with the test results soon!
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