Northern Californians Work With Nicaraguans To Meet Water Needs

Nicaraguan girl pumps water from well refurbished El Porvenir.

"It was really great working so closely with both North Americans and Nicaraguans. You get to understand the problems in your muscles, as well as your mind."

This past month, Sacramento-based nonprofit El Porvenir offered North Americans a taste of life in the Nicaraguan countryside. For two weeks, the travelers helped build wells, washing facilities and latrines, and participated in reforestation efforts.

Bob Fuller, 64, a semi-retired engineer from San Francisco, recently returned from the trip. "It was really great working so closely with both North Americans and Nicaraguans," he said. "You get to understand the problems in your muscles, as well as your mind."

Fresh, clean drinking water is something people in the developed world take for granted, but in the countryside of developing countries like Nicaragua, lack of potable water is a serious health and environmental issue. According to Gerry Condon of El Porvenir, the largest single cause of infant mortality in the developing world is water-borne disease.

Women and children typically walk long distances to open springs or running streams to collect water in jugs and carry them home. The water they collect is often contaminated by animals, groundwater runoff, the washing of clothes nearby and other sources of dirt, debris and bacteria.

The government of Nicaragua, like many governments of developing countries, is unable to meet the need for the most basic infrastructure in the countryside. Basic rural development is carried out primarily by international non-governmental organizations, and the unmet need is enormous.

For the last 12 years, El Porvenir has been working with Nicaraguan peasants to address this problem. El Porvenir, Spanish for "the future," helps rural Nicaraguans build and maintain their own low-tech, sustainable potable water and sanitation projects. Though run almost entirely by volunteers, El Porvenir has financed more than 300 successful projects.

El Porvenir concentrates its work in some of the most remote areas of three Nicaraguan regions, León, Matagalpa and Boaco. Its representatives are well known in those areas, and villagers who want to organize local clean water and sanitation projects, most typically the digging of a well, often seek them out. The organization also builds communal washing facilities adjacent to the wells, and latrines, which help ensure sanitation of the wells by keeping human waste away from the water source.

To complement its water and sanitation projects, El Porvenir has also undertaken reforestation, which helps to protect the watershed that village wells depend on. Two young Nicaraguan men, themselves born and raised in a rural village, serve as the organization's reforestation promoters. They teach village residents how to develop and maintain their own seedling nursery near the well or spring, selecting trees that are particularly suited to their area.

El Porvenir is currently organizing a reforestation work trip for July. For more information, visit www.elporvenir.org, write to 2508 42nd St., Sacramento, CA 95817, or call (916) 736-3663.