Greetings from Managua, Nicaragua

The airport Best Western hotel is a nice spot in an afternoon thunderstorm.  Rain chatters on the tin roofs and tile floors are unharmed by some water splash. Though they are slippery. I'm here for a board meeting of El Porvenir. There will be more pictures of the work of helping people provide themselves with clean water and sanitation facilities. These may have to wait until next week when I'll have better connectivity. Meanwhile, I'm loving the familiar 90 degree humid heat and the greenery.

Nicaraguan communities building a sustainable future

So a well-run North American non-profit organization can assist Nicaraguans by funding improvements in water access and sanitation in remote communities. But what makes those gains stick? The key to sustainability is community ownership and management of the new resources.

This weekend we, El Porvenir board members, visited a new pumping station we had helped a community build.

The murals the community chose to decorate the facility tell a story of hope in the future:

Trees preserve water and the land.

And you don't cut them down.

Apollinaire Sosa is the operator of the facility; the job of ensuring that water flows is his.

He's the fellow who gets to turn the blue wrench.

Elizabeth Torres acts as the community treasurer: she makes sure that the 145 families (over 500 people) served by the metered system pay their monthly assessments. The community is proud that their water system has established that everybody pays and they have built up a reserve fund of over $1000 for any mechanical emergencies.

This is what the future can look like.

Saturday scenes: Nicaragua site visits

El Porvenir partners with the people of rural Nicaragua to bring clean water, safe sanitation, and tools to sustain their land for future generations. Where better to assist this work than in schools? Yesterday we, board members, were driven around to three schools in the Terrabona region.

At Las Joyas:

Students hung on the fence, curious about their North American visitors.

The organization has provided an elegant handwashing station. The neighborhood has decorated it ...

... and teachers amplify the message that clean hands reduce sickness.

The students performed their festive dance with their visitors.

At a nearby pre-school:

More dancing and some enthusiastic drummers ...

... and three squeaky clean latrines, lovingly painted by parents.

The children had made the girls' stall their own; their teacher displayed their toilet paper holder made from a recycled plastic bleach bottle.

At another school we were feted with skits created for Indigenous People's Day:

Besides getting to dress up, kids acted out the story of how invading Spaniards set native people against each other -- the boys got to "bang-bang" very happily.

Students displayed their native foods and plants ...

... while proud mothers watched.

Next post will be about the community-wide pumping and water delivery system which El Porvenir has enabled the community to build and manage.

Friday cat blogging

For Morty's fans, here he is, looking somewhat diminished and perhaps shaken by his 9 day adventure away from home. We're giving him an appetite stimulant. He lost at least a pound and half; he's a very bony fellow these days. Thanks to the E.P. for the photo.

So who's this, you may ask. I don't have a name. I met her Thursday afternoon in Managua, Nicaragua, where I'm visiting for a long weekend with the board of the water and sanitation organization El Porvenir. More over the next few days I am sure.

They know

In Waslala, Nicaragua, on the edge of what we might call civilization, they know. Climate is changing and how humans live in the only world we've got has to change. This sign hangs in the office of El Porvenir in the town. This non-governmental organization, on whose board I have the honor and responsibility to serve, collaborates with rural communities to build water and sanitation facilities while protecting and preserving the health of forests, watersheds, and the land itself. In the Anthropocene age, we're all responsible, for worse and possibly for better.

How's this for a lovely site for a water tank, 1.5 kilometers from most of the clump of 65 families this little system serves -- and another several kilometers from the spring water source on the hill in the distance?

Intrepid members of the board had to scramble down muddy roads and ford a flooding stream on local horses. I'm sure our kindly Nicaraguan hosts thought many of us pretty inept!

Here's a San Francisco-based engineer from the board mugging with the Nicaraguan engineer who is supervising this project. There is joy in this work.

Of course the real payoff will be when the system is hooked up and taps like this one begin to provide water to each household.

Water does not remain clean and available without our cooperation; that's a message for our time. The good people touched by El Porvenir remind themselves and their communities of this every day. There are no days-off. But there is much we can do, together.

On the road again

Watershed improvements in progress.

For the next week, I'll be in Nicaragua attending the board meeting of El Porvenir. This non-profit project

partners with the people of Nicaragua so that they can build a future for themselves. Clean drinking water is at the core of El Porvenir; sanitation is necessary to ensure that the water is clean. In addition to sustainable water and sanitation projects, we work with communities on health and hygiene education and reforestation.

We'll be visiting sites where work in ongoing and helping staff evaluate how we're doing on our tiny piece of meeting the United Nations' Water and Sanitation Sustainability Goal. (Yes, there is such a thing. North Americans blithely ignore the UN, but in much of the world UN standards are assisting development for better lives.)

I don't know how much connectivity I'll have in Nicaragua, so for the next week blogging will be sporadic or perhaps just photos.

Yet another fund appeal ...

Here's an email I sent yesterday to some of my friends ...
Bear with me; I know you’ve probably deleted fifty or more of these in the last week. Please let me tell you why I'm hoping you'll help rural Nicaraguans help their communities by making any donation you can to El Porvenir. (Click the link and go to DONATE.)

Over the last 25 years, El Porvenir has partnered with 165,000 rural Nicaraguans in 600 communities to complete over 1,100 projects. Communities come to our Nicaraguan staff for help; El Porvenir responds with assistance through on-the-ground technical support and your donations.

Clean water from sustainable sources, sanitation facilities, and health education enable very poor people to live longer, better, and more happily. Pretty simple, isn't it?

Many thanks for reading this.

Jan Adams

P.S. Most of you receiving this note, received a similar note from me last year. Many of you responded generously -- my friends contributed a total over $1000 in various amounts. This has been a tough year, but let's stick with people who are living healthier and more hopeful lives because of their own labors and the generosity of those of us who have a little more.

Saturday scenes: Nicaraguan children

At the risk of being trite, an awful lot of Nicaraguan children are simply adorable.

During my recent trip with El Porvenir visiting rural water projects, these young people watched us -- and we watched them.

We are after all a curiosity.

This fellow has had a growth spurt and outgrown his crutches. It was a wonder how undisturbed the dogs at this farm seemed by extra people wandering around.

She's too cool to stare, but not to pose.
***El Porvenir is an non-governmental, people-to-people organization that "partners with the people of Nicaragua so that they can build a future for themselves. Clean drinking water is at the core of El Porvenir; sanitation is necessary to ensure that the water is clean. In addition to sustainable water and sanitation projects, we work with communities on health and hygiene education and reforestation."

More access to clean water leads to better stoves ...

to planting trees ... and to happier women. Here's the logic:

In rural Nicaragua, "cooking" implies at a woman standing over and stoking something very like an open fire. In fact, this stove, on a semi-enclosed porch on a relatively cool day, looks quite pleasant, though it still demands her constant attention.

Sometimes the stove smokes along in an enclosed corner. Women and children often experience high rates of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

Children may be able to gather some kindling. Household members may cut some wood. But roadside wood sellers make a living asking the equivalent of $2 a bundle for this essential fuel. Families' constant demand for firewood contributes to deforestation which in turn leads to erosion and loss of ground water supplies.

So, as El Porvenir helps Nicaraguan communities to help themselves to acquire clean accessible water, an integrated program has drawn the work into reforestation and beyond.

These tiny trees have grown in a community nursery. They are ready to plant.

Families which put in the labor on El Porvenir reforestation projects can receive one of these improved steel top stoves. These use less wood fuel and distribute heat more evenly while venting the smoke out a simple metal chimney pipe. This woman really likes her stove.***Full disclosure: These photos from my trip to Nicaragua last weekend came to be taken because the El Porvenir board and I were engaged in mutual discernment. Would I be a helpful addition to their number? We decided I would be. So after several years of supporting the vital commuity organizing project, I have been added to the board.

Wells don't care for themselves

This lovely fence and garden surround a pump on top of an El Porvenir well near Camoapa. It reinforces the lessons the community who dug this well understand in their guts: since they live just down the road from the town dump, ensuring that their well remains clean is particularly important.

Upkeep requires a community schedule.

All together now ...

PUSH!

Saturday scenes from Carrizal, Nicaragua

Doña Teresa proudly invited us into her home to see the new bio-sand filtration system she has installed with the assistance of El Porvenir.


Fermin explained how households with the system can filter their well water through this inexpensive home rig, saving their children exposure to recurrent bouts of diarrhea.


The householder giggled with delight when she saw me snapping a picture of their astonished kitten.