Hospital Clinic and Water Filtering Program in Phu Ly

Phu Ly Town is the capital in Ha Nam Province and it's about an hour drive by motorbike from Hanoi. Steve's organization, Samaritan's Purse (SP), has a couple projects in Phu Ly and I was able to tag along on one of his field trips. We visited a small clinic that just received donated medical equipment and supplies from the US, but much of the equipment they had not seen before so they got a Canadian doctor to visit and look through it all to see what the clinic could really use. Although the donation was hugely generous (some of the items alone were worth hundreds of dollars), there are some things that hadn't been taken into consideration - some of the equipment was electical and there is a different voltage between North America and Vietnam, luckily they had not yet plugged in the equipment but if they did, it could have caused an electrical fire and ruined the equipment. But there is a simple solution, they will just need to buy a voltage converter which SP will purchase and donate.

Another project SP has in the town is a water filtration program - these filters are actually a Canadian product, invented at the University of Calgary. The filters are made locally (material and labour) and are given to each household that has given a week's work to the project. It uses a natual filtration process using sand to remove iron and arsenic from the water to produce clean drinking water. Not sure if you can tell in the pic, but you pour the well water through the top and the clean water comes out of the spout.