Fijian villages suffer chronic outbreaks of waterborne diseases like typhoid, leptospirosis, and dysentery. These diseases affect everyone in the family; the men and women who miss work, the grandparents at home taking care of the babies and the children who are absent from school because they are sick with diarrhea.

 

This tropical paradise of rainforest and lush vegetation does not have safe drinking water. Rainwater stored in volcanic rock catchments is contaminated with disease from vegetation and runoff, particularly after heavy rains.

 

 

The stations consists of a couple of buckets, a super fine micron filter, a stand to put it all on, and instructions on how to use it.

 

Two 5 gallon buckets, 75 micron bag filter, 10 micron bag filter cloth sheets are utilized. The 10 micron bag filter cloth sheets go in the top bucket and act to pre-filter the water of any dirt and grime. The water then flows down into another bucket through a 0.1 micron sanitary filter that further removes any bugs or disease laden organisms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The training is done in close partnership with the Fiji Ministry of Health and their employees, nurses who live in each village, and can train each family in their own dialect. The villagers ask questions freely and the nurses follow up with them every month. By training the Fijians through their own people, it’s allowed the group to deploy the filtration systems without disrupting the Fiji village culture too.

 

 

 

 

Once trained, the Fijians take the water stations home and set them up for use.

 

The success was overwhelming! Those with these portable Safe Water Filtration Stations were able to easily get water to drink that was safe and would help keep them from getting sick from the water.

 

After 8 months of use and even a super cyclone hitting the island, the water stations were still working great.