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| Our golden chariot! |
Forest and I arrived in Nicaragua the night before, after twenty four hours of traveling.
Well, attempting to travel in any case.
We ran into considerable difficulties in Sao Paulo when the Taca Airlines reps, apparently taking a fancy to us, came up with a plot to keep us and three Australian surfers from leaving Brazil. Once the ladies in the back office finished having it out in Spanish over who got to talk with Forest, we were able to ascertain the reason for our detention. They informed us that anyone traveling from Brazil to Costa Rica must show a Yellow Fever vaccination card – though after a glance at the ripped biceps surrounding me I developed a suspicion that perhaps the Taca ladies enforced this obscure rule rather selectively.
Anyway, after much unpleasantness and a missed flight we were able to bypass the difficulties of going through Costa Rica and book a flight straight to Nicaragua.
8:00 A.M. found us on our way to breakfast with Rob Bell, the executive director of El Porvenir in Nicaragua. Agua Limpia para Nicaragua – “Clean Water for Nicaragua” is the slogan, and mission, of El Porvenir. El Porvenir (which translates to “The Future” in English) is a nonprofit organization which works to provide access to water and sanitation for rural communities throughout Nicaragua.
Over breakfast we discussed a plan for visiting the various projects over the following week, and Rob gave us an overview of how El Porvenir operates in Nicaragua. El Porvenir has a central office in Managua and field offices in each of the six regions in which it works. The field offices generally have three staff members; one for water and sanitation, one for reforestation, and one for hygiene and education. Communities approach the field offices when they want to request a project. Staff members then visit the community to determine its needs, and if the project is accepted El Porvenir provides technical expertise and training, lends tools, and funds the materials needed to complete the projects.
The village benefitting from the project is asked to contribute what they can – usually 5 to 10% - and provide all the labor. In addition, each village elects its own project committee and takes responsibility for the long-term maintenance of its project.
After the project is completed, El Porvenir community health education staff does periodical checkups to work with the villagers and help them become self-sufficient so that they can maintain the project on their own.
Sustainability and sharing of knowledge are two of the keys to El Porvenir’s success. The regional offices hold four education seminars per year. Each community elects two representatives to go to the regional meetings and share their projects and their knowledge as well as learn from the other communities. The representatives then return to their own villages and pass on what they have learned. The communities are able to become increasingly self-sufficient as they learn from others about long-term maintenance of projects, adopt better hygiene practices, and learn about organic farming and how to take better care of the resources that they have.
I was just figuring out how to stay securely on the seat as we navigated the rocky terrain, when all of a sudden Juan brought the bike to a stop. I had to pry my protesting fingers open in order to dismount, as they had become fixed to the rack after clenching the metal for the past twenty five minutes. We were not to the community yet though, and looking around I realized the reason for our sudden stop: a flat front tire. The thought of retracing our path on foot over the hot, dusty, barren terrain did not bring me any joy as we contemplated the sunken tire.
Fortunately though, it wasn’t much further to La Sevita. And amazingly enough there was someone in the tiny 17 family village who had the tools to fix the tire on the spot. Meanwhile, Forest and I spoke with community members and were shown the El Porvenir projects within the community.
Each family had a latrine courtesy of El Porvenir, as well as a pump. However, the pumps had not been used in a month as the generator had burned and was only just being replaced as we arrived. Tranquelino, the village elder, explained to Forest and me that because the pumps had been out of service for the past month, the community had been forced to fetch water from their old source. Tranquelino showed us the source they were currently using: a trickle of water flowing out of the side of a bank below La Sevita. Nowadays it’s normally only used for watering the livestock, and drinking from it had caused stomach sickness for a lot of people, explained Tranquelino.
Every village we visited radiated warmth and gratitude for all that El Porvenir has done for them. They were also very upfront about how much more they still need as a country.
“I am old and already sick,” said Tranquelino’s wife Margarita, “but I hope better for my grandchildren.”
“I am glad to see how young you are,” she said, “you give us hope for the next generation. I hope that you will spread the word. We need so much more. We’ll be waiting for you here.”
Forest and I spent a week traveling from region to region in Nicaragua, and being shown the various projects by staff members from each of the field offices. Each village had a different story to share. Some have completed projects, and some are waiting for funding or still constructing their wells. In the villages without wells, people are walking anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half round trip to collect water. Of these, most have to make several trips a day to the source and many then have to boil the water before it is drinkable.
The men of the family are usually gone during the day working to earn an income for the family (most survive on less than $2 per day!). For this reason the women and children shoulder the burden of fetching water, often spending hours each day carrying 40 pound buckets of water from streams or open wells to serve all the household needs. With so much of their days devoted to finding water, many children do not have time to go to school and get an education. Thus the vicious cycle of poverty continues, and without access to clean water there is little hope of rising above it.
With water comes hope. As El Porvenir observes first-hand, “access to clean drinking water dramatically improves family living standards, reducing disease and child mortality, freeing girls' and women's time, as well as improving school attendance and performance.” More two thirds of rural Nicaraguan communities lack access to safe drinking water. I hold no illusions that the projects can provide an overnight transformation. But for the next generation of Nicaraguans, water is the first step. And in every well dug, and tree planted there is a promise of a better future.
Sadly, Nicaragua is only one piece in a much larger puzzle, as around one billion people lack access to clean water worldwide! The Blue Planet Network is an organization that works to provide water to rural communities around the world. I became involved with the organization last summer after I was inspired by their book Blue Planet Run to organize a race to raise money for the cause. Sustainability and accountability
are the key areas in which the Blue Planet Network set really sets itself apart from other organizations.
The Peer Water Exchange (PWX) is essentially the implementation arm of the Blue Planet Network. In a nutshell, PWX allows funders, NGOs, communities, monitors, and the public to collaborate transparently to end the global water crises. The following is directly from the Peer Water Exchange website: “The real problem is that we continue to apply the same ineffective solutions hoping the crises will go away. The world's crises cannot be solved by traditional approaches; we need to first change our mindset to overcome deep-rooted roadblocks in our system.
“[Successful solutions] involve community organization, appropriate technology, hygiene, sanitation, transfer of ownership, change in behavior, and long-term maintenance. Integrating these dimensions - one project at a time - is hard. This difficulty has made our ability to scale the work within our current bureaucratic philanthropic process impossible. PWX creates a new mindset and model - Philanthropy 2.0 - that with 100% transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness destroys our roadblocks to help us solve humanity's crises.”
“2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene” - BPN
To learn more about El Porvenir, the Blue Planet Network, or the Peer Water Exchange, and how you can get involved – or to make a donation – visit their websites:
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| A woman carrying water up the mountain in Payacuca. A ten minute walk uphill WITHOUT jugs. Thanks to El Porvenir and the Blue Planet Network all Payacuca residents will soon have access to water pumps near their houses. |
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| A well under construction. |
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| 40 people representing 20 communities learning and sharing with each other during one of El Porvenir's day and a half long conferences. |
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| Rooftop water collection for washing clothes. |
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| Marlon showing us the old open well used by several families before El Porvenir funded the current water project. |
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| Marlon showing us the pump system installed in Payacuca by El Porvenir. |
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| An unimproved drinking source that caused much illness and diarrhea in the community before El Porvenir funded a well project. |
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| Girl drawing potable water from an El Porvenir well. |
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| Beginning of a reforestation project. |
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| A well under construction. |
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| Open latrine used by a family. |
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| Double-pit latrine constructed by El Porvenir. |
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| Unimproved drinking water source. |
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| A well almost complete after two years of digging. |
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| Mischief. |
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| Unbelievably polluted stream running through town. |
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| Washing clothes in the river. |
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| Collecting water from the river. |
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| Constructing a well. |
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| Unimproved drinking source. |
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| Drawing water from a completed well. |
***I meant to post this last week on World Water Day, March 22nd, but I didn’t have internet access as I was working on an El Porvenir project with a group from Washington State in La Culebra, a small village that does not even have electricity***
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| World Water Day Piñata courtesy of El Porvenir |
