Capturing Rain and Fighting Poverty
Jorgina Ana Soza lives in the rural Quemadas section of Mirandiba, a small city in the northeast of Brazil. She is 40 years old and is married with four children, two of whom are nieces that she and her husband adopted when her sister died. Her mother and cousin also live in the same small house.
Jorgina works in her well-irrigated garden.
Catholic Relief Services, with the generous support of the ALSAM Foundation, began a large emergency flood response program in 2004, funding the work of many local partners in northeastern Brazil's semi-arid region. One of those projects included rebuilding a dam near Jorgina's house after the levee broke during extreme rains in 2004. Previously, the dam was secured only by mud and rocks. CRS supplied cement, sand and large stones in 2005, and CRS' local partner organization, CONVIVER, recruited community members to manually reconstruct the dam.
Repairing the dam was vital because the communities rely on the dam during the annual eight month dry season. The Quemadas dam, for example, has been the sole water source for 38 families.
Thirteen men in the area worked on the project when they could, but Jorgina and nine other women were the backbone of the operation. Ranging in age from 19 to 46, the neighbors worked 9-hour days, Monday to Thursday, every week for five months in 2005. Jorgina and her niece talk about the social aspect of the work. "Before the dam broke we didn't know many of our neighbors. We all worked together, talking the whole time. We brought rice and beans and cooked lunch there. The community really came together."
While the women in Quemadas were building their new levee, CRS funded the creation of a seed-bank in Mirandiba to complement the availability of water. This sustainable project is giving small farmers access to large quantities of corn and bean seeds, as well as a variety of previously unavailable fruit tree seedlings. CRS has made sure that the people of Mirandiba are able to effectively use the water that they have worked so hard to secure. Simultaneously CONVIVER and the Brazilian government installed cisterns in the area, increasing access to water in Quemadas dramatically.
This new levee captures the winter rains, so the Quemadas dam has not gone dry this summer.
Jorgina reflects on life before the water and agriculture projects. "We suffered a lot. We didn't have water for cooking; we didn't have fruit."
Those who worked to reconstruct the dam were paid on a daily basis for their labor. This helped members of the poor Quemadas community to buy much-needed basic material items. "We didn't have shoes and hardly had any clothes. CRS helped us a lot."
Before the repairs, the dam was completely dry. The women walked almost 2 miles each way every morning to a small well. The dam is closer to Jorgina's house, and is large enough for the entire community to use at once. The water level falls over the course of the long dry season, but the dam will not go dry if it is able to capture rain from November to February. With the strong new levee in place, the Quemadas community should have secure access to water from now on.
