Spring, the season of growth and renewal, brings with it two major global, environmental events: World Water Day, which was March 22, and Earth Day, last Saturday. Both celebrations promote the conservation and development of our most precious natural resources. Yet the events also draw attention to serious health issues affecting the international community, such as unsafe and inadequate water supplies’a problem most common among poor populations in developing countries. More than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation, according to the second United Nations World Water Development Report (March 2006). ‘Water is now on the front burner,’ says Deborah Parducci, a Pacific Palisades resident. She serves on the board of Agua Para La Vida, a nongovernmental organization that has been helping small rural communities in Nicaragua construct their own drinking water systems since 1987. Nicaragua is the second-poorest nation in the Americas, after Haiti, because of natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and frequent hurricanes) and man-made troubles, such as the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, during which most of the country’s infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. The Nicaraguan government, now a young democracy led by President Enrique Bola’os Geyer, lacks the resources to provide an effective drinking water program for rural communities. Yet access to potable water is a top priority, especially following the damage caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The majority of infant disease and death is due to water-related diseases such as diarrhea and cholera. Agua Para La Vida, which means ‘Water for Life’ in Spanish, not only helps communities build their drinking water systems but also educates local people about health and hygiene and trains a team of community members on how to maintain their system. ‘One of the things you learn is that poverty is not the issue; it’s quality of life,’ says Parducci, a retired nurse and mother of five. ‘People in the villages did not understand that it was the clear running water that was making them sick.’ Parducci got involved with APLV in the mid-1990s because she believed the organization was effective and she knew one of the founding members, Gilles Corcos, a professor emeritus in the mechanical engineering department at UC Berkeley. He started APLV with one of his student advisees, Charlie Huizenga, now a researcher and lecturer in the architecture department at Berkeley. Their first project in Nicaragua was for a farming cooperative with a population of 280 people. Corcos says they learned ‘quite a bit about how these people lived”dispersed even within the village and in isolated rural areas with no electricity and poor quality dirt roads. Because Corcos and Huizenga started the organization during the country’s civil war, they also experienced 17-year-old village boys being sent off to fight against the Contras, the right-wing guerilla group that attacked mostly civilian targets such as coffee plantations and farming cooperatives. ‘We both felt good about doing something positive for a country that was under the onslaught of the American government through its support of the Contras,’ Huizenga says. Originally a California-based group, APLV is now recognized as a Nicaraguan NGO and also has a French branch that was created in 2002. Thus far, the organization has spearheaded the construction of 41 village water systems, serving more than 13,000 people. APLV operates out of the Rio Blanco region, near the geometric center of Nicaragua, and helps rural communities in a surrounding area of about 1,550 square miles. The systems that APLV builds are supplied by springs located higher than the villages and are entirely gravity-driven. Water flows in an underground pipe from the spring to a concrete tank built close to the community. The tank water then flows through a distribution system to faucets in the village. With gravity systems, ‘people use more water since it is usually brought closer to each house,’ Huizenga says. ‘More water means better health.’ The Nicaraguan people use about 40 liters (less than 10 gallons) of water daily per person, which is about one-tenth of what we use in the United States. The water is tested for fecal coliform bacteria at the beginning of an APLV project as well as on a regular basis once the project is complete. ‘The first step is for each family to build latrines with materials and instruction that we provide,’ Huizenga says. ‘The water system itself can take six weeks for a small project and up to six months for a big project. During that process, we are doing community health education and water system maintenance training.’ Mothers are given a simple, ‘ingenious’ scale with which they can weigh their children every month and record the weight without knowing how to read and write. They are also taught about the proper growth rate of healthy infants. In addition to providing clean water technology and education, APLV has social consequences as well. The village women are usually the first to grasp the connection between diseases and polluted water because they and their children are traditionally the water gatherers. As in many developing countries, Nicaraguan women and girls walk long distances to collect water, often from polluted sources. APLV believes that women should be involved in the process of building and maintaining the drinking water systems because the impact is usually greatest on them. In fact, women are often project managers while men perform the more labor-intensive work. This is a new but generally positive experience for Nicaraguans who are accustomed to a male-dominated culture, according to Corcos and Huizenga. In many cases, constructing a water system with APLV is the people’s first experience in communal working, Corcos says. Each family in the village must commit to about 30 days of work and ongoing requirements of project maintenance. ‘It’s backbreaking work and it’s a big commitment,’ Huizenga says. The spring might be five miles from a village, which means the villagers would have to dig a trench across that distance. ‘One thing you learn is that in a developing country like Nicaragua, setbacks are the norm’the truck breaks down all the time, materials are delayed, you get a bad batch of pipe,’ Huizenga continues. ‘The thing that’s amazing is that the people there are so resilient to this stuff.’ The organization also works with communities to acquire, restore and protect forests around the spring from deforestation, a result of logging and clearing land for agriculture, which is common in Nicaragua. The villagers sow native species seeds in community nurseries and transplant those seedlings to the watershed, to help retain soil during the rainy season. The community also builds a fence around the spring to keep the cattle out. Part of the significance of APLV’s effect on the villages is to keep those communities self-sufficient. In 1996, the organization started a technical school, Escuela Tecnica de Agua Potable (ETAP) which trains farmers, or ‘campesinos,’ to be water technicians. Most of the students have not had a full secondary education, and the two- to three-year curriculum teaches them engineering, project management, accounting and surveying, as well as computer skills. To date, three classes of six students have graduated from the school. Two full-time social workers from APLV remain in the village long after the completion of a project, to give the community support. But Parducci says that by teaching the villagers how to construct, manage and maintain their own drinking water systems, the organization has already given them the lasting skills they need. ‘It’s doable by local people,’ she says. ‘For every village that gets water, several villages hear about it.’ APLV’s drinking water systems are designed to last more than 25 years and require minimal maintenance. A typical project, involving 25 to 30 families, costs about $12,000. Funding goes to water system materials, latrines, community health education, watershed conservation and the technical training school. Donors can also choose to fund an individual project. For more information, visit www.aplv.org or contact Agua Para La Vida at (510) 643-8003 or aplv@aplv.org.
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