This week we have had a brief meeting with the sales representative for Hydrologic for our province. Due to the language barrier we did not make rapid progress with him, however we managed to get the message across that we would like to help Hydrologic set up a distribution network for CWP's in the area. We then arranged a meeting for after the weekend to meet and find a vendor.
Evelyn and Angus went to meet a monk who we had made friends with with at the start of the project. It turns out by a huge coincidence that the monk had already owned a CWP for two years. He mentioned that he got it from a pharmacy opposite the CHO offices. This was a big surprise for us as up until now, our understanding was that there were no CWP vendors in Poipet.
The next day we visited the pharmacy, however it turned out that they were not selling it anymore and they could not tell us why. The next few shops sold mineral pots. We asked them a few questions about the product. These visits highlighted an important question to us that we overlooked before. Are mineral pots effective at water treatment, and if so should we not be working with a technology like that, which already has an established market?
In order to solve this conundrum we got in touch with all the contacts we have made in the past few weeks to try to ascertain if there is any solid evidence that mineral pots are not as effective as CWP's. We are still waiting on solid evidence. However several NGO's have informed us from internal studies that some brands of mineral pots may have design flaws that actually breed bacteria and may cause the water quality to worsen rather than improve. We have decided to continue working with CWP's for the very reason that they have officially been tested and are effective. However we are still looking into the effectiveness of mineral pots.....
On Tuesday we had a meeting with the sales rep for Hydrologic. We were very impressed with how efficient he was. By the time we had met him in the afternoon, he had already located two shops in Poipet that would be happy to sell CWP's. This was great news for us as we thought this may take a few weeks to do. This means we can focus strongly on working with the communities and promoting and marketing the product.
To do this we aim to work with CHO and visit communties, village chiefs, schools, hospitals and any other public venue. Another avenue we plan to work down is the provincial radio. This opportunity came around by our friend the monk! We went to visit him as he wanted us to meet his step sister who had never met a foreigner before. We ended up going in convoy on moto's with the monk through Poipet which was a bizarre experience. Through conversation with him and his sister it turns out he has his own radio show. His is going to give us a shout out tonight at the end of his show which is quite exciting. Its a bit of a weird feeling having your name read out on the radio by a monk! But we hope we can help highlight the importance of clean drinking water and CWP's through his show.
On thursday we hit another snag in our plan. The realisation that ceramic pots potentially do not treat viruses. This is a problem in itself, but becomes a bigger problem when the people most likely to buy the filters are people who already boil water, and boiling water removes viruses, so by promoting CWP's are we promoting a product that is actually worse for you than what they are already using?
Its not quite as straight forward as this though. Boiling water is very expensive, time consuming and can cause long term respiratory problems. However can that be compared to CWP's not being effective against viruses? and can they co-exist? and why are they already being distributed if this is a problem?
This is what we are now trying to solve. We will update you when we work it out. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment!
Jack
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