Health Official/Testing??

The past two days have involved a lot of planning and trying to contact important individuals in Phrao. There are eleven villages in the sub-district of Mae Wen and we would like to assess the water system in each village. There are, however, issues with the testing so far. Since we do not have our own testing kit we have to send the sample away to get tested. We have found one local testing agency but they do not test for Manganese which is one of our main concerns. There is also another testing agency in Chiang Mai, the nearest city, but they are very costly and will take too long to get back to us. So we are in the process of finding an affordable and fast testing center.

Today, our team was able to meet with the health official in one of the local clinics. This clinic takes care of three of the villages in Mae Wen. The official does not believe that anyone has had water-borne illnesses, which removes one major potential problem. The official was, however, able to give us a database of all the illnesses that occurred in the last year and in what village. We are currently in the process of analyzing this information.

We also visited two more villages! The first was village 10 which has a pretty good system in place. Each of the 500 members of the village has access to clean drinking water. Directly across the road is village 7, which has privately owned hand-dug wells ranging from 8-10 meters deep. These wells are costly to upkeep because every 3 years the pump needs to replaced which costs 3000 batt. Only three families in the whole village drink bottled water because the rest presumably cannot afford it.