In November 2013, five Project Redwood partners traveled to Nicaragua to visit the sites of several funded projects.
Rich Jerdonek in a pottery cooperative, with the proprietor.
We flew into Managua over Lake Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America. The view was spectacular. Active volcanoes emitted smoke from their calderas. Hundreds of dormant cones were visible, some topped by cloud forests and crater lakes. Green mountains upon mountains stretched toward the north and east, with fertile valleys to the south–truly a tropical paradise, with abundant rain in the wet season, two large navigable lakes, and many streams, springs and wells.
Unfortunately, the water in Nicaragua’s countryside isn’t drinkable. The water sources for the rural poor are contaminated with disease-bearing microbes. To address this in a concerted way, Project Redwood and our partners–Compatible Technology (CTI), Emerging Opportunities for Sustainability (EOS), and Self-Help (SHI)–have already added chlorinators to the water supplies of about 375 villages serving over 200,000 people.
In the US we take clean, safe water for granted, but in rural Nicaragua frequent bouts of waterborne disease exact a significant toll in productivity and days lost from school. Even worse, seriously ill children frequently die from diarrhea. For Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, ahead only of Haiti, the lack of safe water is both a major cause and consequence of poverty.
The people of Nicaragua are intelligent, motivated, friendly, and open to new ideas–despite their poverty and very limited resources. We were impressed with the collaboration and cooperation among public-health doctors, US-based and local NGO staff, village people responsible for the daily operation of their water system, and operators of large coffee plantations and processing plants.
We met in three regional centers with dozens of people representing MINSA, local staff of our NGO partners, and Nicaraguan people who head the water committees (CAPS) in their villages. In Matagalpa the Ministry of Health (MINSA) reported to us a marked drop in infant mortality since the CTI8 chlorinators were introduced. Our team visited villages, coffee plantations, homes, and coffee-processing plants where chlorinators are installed to see the results first- hand. The story was always the same – spoken from the heart with strength and commitment: safe water has a tremendous impact on health, vitality, and mortality.
The CTI-8 chlorinator is simple but extremely effective. Some villages have had more complex systems, suited to more developed areas of the world, which were too difficult to operate. Most of these villages could not afford the expense of running and maintaining these systems, which is why many of these systems failed. In contrast, the CTI-8 has no moving parts, requires no power source, and uses an inexpensive tablet to add germ-killing chlorine for weeks at a time. Working with CTI, we are supporting initiatives that will result in even greater MINSA cooperation across Nicaragua and a broader use of a new and inexpensive filter system appropriate to very small villages or isolated homesteads that currently lack safe water. Our team is also providing a water storage tank in a village whose old tank is no longer usable or repairable – the villagers will contribute the other materials and labor.
More than anything our visit was about meeting people: two young women operating their water system at a very poor village near the top of a steep, rocky mountain road; the clinic director and plantation workers at a remote, beautiful coffee plantation where the population surges to 1,300 resident workers during the three-month harvest; residents of a village in the very poor south that teamed up to rebuild their entire water system to reap the benefit of chlorination; women from several rural communities joining together for training in business skills to increase their income from baked goods, delicious nacatamale,s and desserts. Everywhere we were welcomed, accepted, thanked, and encouraged.
We realized that what we have done is small compared to the contribution of the people in this lovely country that is emerging from the ravages of civil war. We came away with an optimism about the long-term impact, sustainability, and replicability of our grantees’ work there to meet the needs of people for safe water and economic independence in Nicaragua and worldwide.
More about Waterborne Disease and the Benefits of Safe Water
Safe, clean water is essential for human health, especially for young children. Waterborne disease has devastating effects where clean water is not available.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_diseases),“Various forms of waterborne diarrheal disease probably are the most prominent examples [of causes of infant and child mortality], and affect mainly children in developing countries; according to the World Health Organization, such diseases account for an estimated 4.1% of the total DAILY global burden of disease, and cause about 1.8 million human deaths annually. The World Health Organization estimates that 88% of that burden is attributable to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene.”
Dramatically reducing infant deaths from diarrhea as has been observed and reported in Matagalpa is compelling. Cholera, another water-borne disease of increasing concern in Nicaragua, could have a devastating effect if brought into the country from other parts of Latin America and/or the Caribbean. In the last three years 8,400 people have died of cholera in Haiti–a country with approximately twice the population of Nicaragua. Chlorinating the country’s water supply would help safeguard the population from such an epidemic.
Economic impacts of safe water reducing water-borne disease include improved productivity and school attendance, and more effective absorption of food nutrients. A 2008 WHO study estimates the benefit-to-cost ratio of safe water at about 10 to 1 (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2008/9789241596435_eng.pdf). Safe water encourages and supports other sanitation practices. We saw clearly how important and beneficial safe water is to the people of Nicaragua as we met with the MINSA officials and CAPS representatives on our trip. The adoption of the CTI-8 chlorinator by coffee plantations and processors for their workers is another indicator.
The CTI water-chlorination project has very likely had the broadest impact of any PRW project so far in terms of the number of people affected. This benefit can be difficult to communicate to people in the US who take plentiful safe water for granted. Testimonials such as those we heard in Matagalpa, Jinotega, and San Carlos; a community survey similar to the one conducted two years ago; and the gathering of MINSA country-wide data on infant deaths like what we saw in Matagalpa can all contribute to improving this understanding. And from our perspective, seeing and hearing is believing.