On a Friday in Colombia, our WTW Amazon team gathered with employees from MetLife to build filters that would directly impact families who need clean water. The MetLife staff connected deeply and emotionally to the hands-on work they were doing, as many of them had either directly experienced problems with lack of clean water or had families that were still challenged by poor quality water.
Wine To Water’s Chief Programs Officer, Richard Vanderberg was at the event. “I’ve never been to a Filter Build before but to see the magic of people actually touching and assembling the filters is really powerful.”
What was even better is that we actually got to distribute filters the very next day. We spent the day distributing filters in two communities in the state of Meta. Both of these communities lack municipal sewage and water so people have septic tanks and get their water from wells. Not surprisingly, the groundwater is contaminated.
Colombia team member Wilton has a long history of humanitarian work and has been involved in the WASH sector for a long time. He also lives in Meta. Wilton has visited the communities many times and built great relationships. He spent the day educating the community members about the filters and WASH more generally.
Distributing filters addresses an immediate need and builds trust, which we can then leverage into bigger programs and solutions. There is no shortage of communities that need filters. We currently have an additional 6 on deck where we have conducted baseline surveys and done some pilot programs.