In February of 2016 Adventure Sports Tours teamed up with Project Save Our Surf’s Karon Pardue and professional surfer Mary Osborne to bring a group of young Santa Barbara surfers to El Salvador to distribute clean water filters to families and schools in need. El Salvador, like other third world countries, is a place where water is seriously polluted and a large part of the wastewater is discharged directly into the environment without treatment. That’s why P.S.O.S. thought this was a good location for their Clean water filter program.
Karon is the Vice President of Project Save Our Surf and also the Surf Coach for Santa Barbara’s Dos Pueblos Surf Team. She put together a group of young volunteers to raise funds and travel to El Salvador to distribute the clean water filter systems and educate people on the proper use of these filters, which will provide clean drinking water for up to five years. The group led by Karon Pardue consisted of Cecily Russell, Cassidy Urbany, Matty Pierce, Lia Barteet, Lia Turiano, Tave Grabenheinrich, Mika Taa, and Jesse “SBD” Freeland. Together they held multiple fundraising events in Santa Barbara prior to the trip to purchase the water filters, and it wasn’t long before the volunteers were on their way to LAX to catch an overnight flight to El Salvador.
The group bounced between AST La Liberated and the more tropical AST Las Flores. Every day started with a surf before leaving the beach for a new adventure, from hiking to waterfalls to making their own pupusas for lunch, and then distributing ten clean water filter systems.
Editor’s Note: Project Save Our Surf is currently working on setting up more missions to El Salvador and expanding the project into Nicaragua. You can learn more about them on Facebook here.
