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In addition to helping the community obtain clean drinking water, we identified numerous ways to help. They also face issues with sanitation and energy challenges. Field Ready's Georg Hoehne produced items on-the-ground and stayed the next few days to assess and teach some of these solutions.
The region has an abundance of agricultural waste which is not being utilized very well. We explained that the waste can be used as a fertilizer, and thus built a composting system, and educated the school children how to use it. This idea was novel to the local farmers and teachers.
An additional problem faced by the community is that cooking gas is very expensive and has to be moved to the region taking at least three hours up a very steep and dangerous road, which is not accessible during heavy rains. During the project, local people were taught how they could use cow dung and other animal excrement to produce their own biogas plant, saving them a lot of money and assuring a continuous supply of gas for their kitchen.
Field Ready continued the assessment in another part of Colombia and went to a large city near the border of Venezuela. With the situation in Venezuela intensifying, every day 35,000 people cross the border, with roughly 4,000 stays in Colombia. The population goes back in forth in order to buy what they need and then take items back to Venezuela. Along with this back and forth migration, there are a set of issues and dangers that arise (e.g., drug issues and the sex trade).