Without Water There Is No Life

By Robyn Fieser

It's a dusty March day in the parched little town of Potrerillo, in northern Nicaragua. Some 15 villagers cram into a single-room, concrete schoolhouse for one of many meetings leading up to the construction of a community aqueduct. Planned to pump from a nearby spring, the CRS-funded aqueduct promises to bring water to the doorsteps of about 15 families, many of whom now have to walk a mile or more to get their water.

Under discussion is the formation of committees—community groups charged with everything from chlorinating the water to making the rules on how it can be used. There's talk of neighboring communities pitching in to lay the more than 4,000 feet of underground pipes needed. Even those who won't directly benefit are in attendance.

"If we don't have water, we don't have anything. It's fundamental," says Potrerillo resident Donald Davila. "I'm not going to get water from this, but I've got a little girl in the school and the community knows that [the students] are our future."

Conspicuously missing are the sons of one of the landowners. Their permission is needed to build the project.

"Their father approves of the project, but the kids do not, and they keep sending messages but not attending any of the meetings," says Leonidas Casco, an agricultural engineer with CRS agricultural development partner Fundación de Investigación y Desarrollo Rural (Research and Rural Development Foundation). "We don't understand it."

A Response for the Whole Community

For years, strained relations of one sort or another have delayed projects that would have brought a year-round source of water to this farming community. It is an example of how thorny the issue of water access has become in Nicaragua.

With 2 lakes, more than 75 rivers and at least 30 lagoons, between 10 and 15 percent of the country's surface area is water. But due to environmental degradation, corporate abuse, pollution, lack of public interest and plain scarcity in some regions, a third of the population does not have access to clean drinking water. The situation is worse for people in rural areas, where many families are without potable water and are forced to use shallow wells or rivers and lakes overloaded with residential sewage, pesticides and industrial toxins.

The Mi Cuenca ("My Watershed") project is part of a $150-million, seven-agency Global Water Initiative, slated to run from 2006 through 2016.

Under Mi Cuenca, Catholic Relief Services is comprehensively tackling the crisis of water and sanitation in Nicaragua by developing projects that will have a lasting impact on health, education, the environment and economic development. Activities include supporting communities as they build latrines and install small-scale irrigation systems, and encouraging community leaders to advocate for responsible water policies. The project is helping 1,100 families in 4 of Nicaragua's 15 departments manage and protect their community water sources.

In Nicaragua's northern department of Esteli, where Potrerillo is located, only 5 percent of families participating in Mi Cuenca can irrigate their fields. The rest are limited to cultivating their corn, beans and other crops during the two rainy seasons: June to July and September to October.

"The situation forces a lot of people to migrate either to Costa Rica or El Salvador during off months," explains Jorge Castellon, who manages the project in Nicaragua for CRS.

Making matters worse, much of the land in Esteli is hilly and severely eroded, which causes runoff that further contaminates community rivers, streams and ponds. For this reason, Mi Cuenca teaches better watershed management and sound farming practices in addition to providing access to water for household and agricultural purposes.

Education and Irrigation to Fight Erosion

In Potrerillo, for example, the project encourages farmers to line fields with rows of grasses that can be used to feed livestock while providing natural barriers that prevent runoff and erosion. CRS works with those farmers to further fight erosion by reforesting key sites within the community's watersheds. The project is also helping a number of farmers install water-saving drip irrigation systems that replace the technique of flooding fields with water, which is wasteful and leads to erosion. With improved water use for irrigation, poor farmers will be able to increase their production and earn more income.

"By conserving and making better use of water, we are literally saving lives," says Conor Walsh, CRS country representative in Nicaragua. "Without water there is no life, but by protecting the natural environment and teaching people how to conserve and harvest water, we are helping them to stay on the land and have healthier, more productive lives."

To ensure people will continue to use the methods they've learned long after Mi Cuenca ends, CRS is helping communities organize and plan for the future. By providing training that includes conflict resolution, accounting and basic organizational skills, the communities are better equipped to manage the water sources and avoid the type of infighting that has stalled progress in the past.

The people of Potrerillo know firsthand that success often depends more on community organization and management than it does on good will. For them, the aqueduct is a longtime dream, which, five years ago, evaporated in a cloud of conflict over land use.

"We know that this aqueduct is going to make an impact on the entire community and that we have to work to resolve whatever issues stand in our way. If we don't do this now, who will?" asks Davila.

Robyn Fieser is CRS' regional information officer for Latin America and the Caribbean based in Guatemala.