For the last couple of years, Jorge Fernandez has heavily invested his time and skills to help four-time Project Redwood grantee Compatible Technologies International (CTI) bring clean water to rural villagers of Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. He has long wanted to share a visit there with his fellow Project Redwood partners. This past November, four classmates joined him on a tour of CTI installations among the hills of the north central Matagalpa-Jinotega region; what they found invigorated and inspired them.
Jorge and classmates Rich Jerdonek, Dave Fletcher, Donna Allen, and Ann McStay began in Managua, then visited communities near Matagalpa, Jinotega, and San Carlos before wrapping up the trip in Granada. (hover over photo for caption)
CTI’s installations are mostly in the mountainous, rural areas of Nicaragua. The clusters of tin-roofed, dirt-floored huts scattered on hillsides are home to “extremely industrious, intelligent, hard-working people,” says Jorge, “and they are very conscious of thier water.” Most of these villagers, he adds, while very poor, labor diligently to be self sufficient. During the 8 or 9 months of the year that they aren’t harvesting coffee on nearby plantations, families raise chickens and pigs or cows, and grow the corn, beans, bananas and vegetables they need to subsist.
The means for delivering essential water to homes often must be built by the villagers themselves. Most settlements have a water committee, formed by locals, whose members find and tap into uphill artesian sources of water, usually from ground aquifers that are under natural pressure. Once a source is harnessed, the entire community gets to work digging a trench, sometimes up to ten kilometers long, and laying plastic pipes to get the water back to a central storage unit; from there, it is gravity fed to individual village huts or to community faucets.
The chlorinators are important, says Jorge, because while the water looks clean, it is often contaminated and those who drink it can fall ill with, or even die from, hepatitis, cholera, and other gastrointestinal ailments. An affordable CTI-designed device solves that problem. Incoming water is exposed to chlorine from tables in a chlorinator, a simple, non-electric system of plastic pipes and valves that ensures that the dosage is sufficient to make outgoing water safe to drink.
CTI’s approach is an important part of what makes the program successful. Health education and community commitment are the most critical elements; locals must be willing, for example, to thoroughly clean their system’s holding tank every three to four weeks. “If there is no commitment, we don’t do a thing,” says Jorge, “We train them on what to do to get their act together, and after they do, we install the chlorination system.” Several hundred chlorinators have been deployed and provide clean water to nearly 100,000 homes.
CTI has two in-country technicians, invaluable guys who are six days a week on motorcycles distributing chlorine tablets, putting seminars together, attending community fairs and shows, and installing new chlorinators. CTI is also partnering with another United States-based non-profit, EOS International, which has begun distributing CTI’s chlorinators along with their own drip irrigations systems, bio-digestors, and fuel-efficient barrel overs.
Jorge’s dream has been to get clean water to a quarter of a million rural Nicaraguans by June of 2014. Project Redwood funding is helping to realize that dream.