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Tag: clean water

Transforming Lives Through Composting Latrines: A Story of Hope, Dignity, and Community Unity

Posted on by Liz Baldwin

Background:

The Eben-Ezer Church, together with the local community association and leaders, has identified the incredible need for proper waste management and education in Las Mañanitas, El Salvador. Currently, 70 families do not have access to adequate waste disposal, compromising the health of each family as well as the entire community. For the first stage of this project, the church and community have identified 30 families who are in great need of intervention. 

 

Make Shift Pit LatrinePit LatrineWaste Goes Into Ground Water

 

 

Impact Story Written by: Jackson Bueno

Las Mañanitas is a rural hamlet in the coffee-rich area of Sonsonate, El Salvador. The broader area of Juayua comprises approximately 24,465 people, 42% of whom are struggling with multidimensional poverty.  Most families rely on small-scale farming and seasonal coffee employment to survive, making roughly $140 per month. Homes are often built with makeshift materials and most families do not have running water or bathrooms in or near their homes. They use open-air pits that leak into water sources, causing a variety of illnesses, especially dangerous to children under five. 

 

Make shift Pit Latrine               Pit Latrine

 

As a member of the Las Mañanitas community, Ingrid, a young homemaker and mother, faced challenges similar to those of her neighbors. While Ingrid cares for their two children, her husband finds work harvesting coffee and farming their own small family plot of corn and beans. But when the coffee season comes to an end, he is forced to find work elsewhere, often causing him to be away from home for days on end. According to Ingrid, having a latrine right outside her door was a dream that seemed to be years away. Until they could save enough money, they had to use open-air pits, which lacked any privacy, was worrisome in terms of her family’s health and personal safety, and was incredibly taxing as she raised her children. 

 

This changed when Eben-Ezer Church, working with its community, stepped in by helping them and many other families in her neighborhood build a composting latrine next to their homes.

 

New Composting Latrines

 

During the building process, however, Ingrid became worried that she could not contribute in the way all beneficiary families are asked. The project’s design relied both on donations from others but also on the participation of each beneficiary family in the form of labor and/or additional materials. When the project commenced, her husband was away working and her son fell ill, which threatened to drain the meager savings they had. 

 

When church members heard of her distress, they volunteered to help. Ingrid noted that it was the son of the pastor who led the volunteers as they transported materials to her home and helped to build, keeping her dreams of having a latrine on their homestead. 

 

Family in front of new composting latrine
Ingrid and her two young children in front of her new composting latrine.

 

The implementation of a composting latrine significantly transformed Ingrid’s family life and broader community, enhancing emotional well-being, safety, and environmental health. More than a mere physical structure, this initiative instilled hope, upheld dignity, and demonstrated a tangible expression of God’s love, marking a profound shift towards sustainable living and community unity.

Triumph in El Triunfo: A Community’s Journey to Clean Water

Posted on by Liz Baldwin

From Pastor Orlando’s earliest memories until last fall, the people of El Triunfo have suffered from water scarcity. In the dry season, they used to trespass to collect water from distant springs on private property. In the rainy season, they collected rainwater, filtered it through a cloth, and drank water the color of weak coffee that gave them parasitic dysentery. 

 

When vomiting and diarrhea grew severe, they either spent $30 for a truck ride to the clinic in Ciudad Barrios or they walked 10 km over washed-out roads while sick.

 

Contaminated Water

 

Water scarcity was not all that troubled “Brother Orlando,” as he’s known today. He was also haunted by questions about whether or not he’d be a good father, having grown up without a dad as a role model. 

 

In 2009, ENLACE began to accompany Emanuel Church in El Salvador  where Brother Orlando was pastor. His community, El Triunfo,  identified “scarcity and difficulty obtaining drinkable water” as their number one problem, so Brother Orlando helped found the Community Development Association of El Triunfo (known by its Spanish acronym, ADESCO). With Emanuel Church’s support, the newly-organized ADESCO began meeting with their mayor. Eventually, their efforts were rewarded with the donation of a plot of land with a spring on it! 

 

Community Meeting

 

Community Meeting

 

Community members immediately invested in improving the land, then started raising funds to build a water tank and distribution system. Fundraising for such a project proved too ambitious for the subsistence farmers of El Triunfo, but Brother Orlando didn’t give up. 

 

Salvadorans in community

 

From 2010 to 2019 Emanuel Church and community leaders worked together on smaller projects like eco stoves, composting latrines, and a crosswalk over a road. They hosted medical visits, repaired their local school’s roof, and even built homes.

 

“Those were not wasted years,” says Brother Orlando, smiling with pride as he shares that every step of the way the church and ADESCO were learning valuable lessons about building relationships, mobilizing local resources, project design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, sustainability, and tangibly loving neighbors as an expression of God’s love. 

 

Ten years into their journey, in 2019, Emanuel Church and community leaders decided it was time to finally tackle the water problem. They designed storage tanks and a distribution system. They managed six to ten volunteer workers each day, women and men alike, for several months nonstop. Two ENLACE Short-Term Service Trip teams joined the effort. Then the rainy season hit. Work was delayed. Then COVID-19 brought everything to a halt…but Brother Orlando didn’t give up. 

 

Emanuel Church partnered with ENLACE, World Vision, and the mayor’s office to make sure the community’s poorest families had food and made visits to attend to people’s spiritual lives. 

 

Work resumed in June 2022, but COVID had taken a toll. Working-aged people had fled to the US for work out of desperation. Family economies were unstable. The government had abused its COVID-related powers, arresting innocent people, leaving few workers…but Brother Orlando didn’t give up.

 

Woman digging

 

Everyone at Emanuel Church prayed to God for guidance. The few church and community members left, mostly women, got back to work. Teenagers helped. People who had fled to the US heard about the effort and started raising money to pay day laborers from the neighboring town—God had answered their prayers. 

 

Building Water Tank

 

Water Tank

 

Once again, Emanuel Church and the ADESCO were meeting regularly with the mayor, who sent two excavators to help bury pipe. “They did six months of work in six weeks!” said Brother Orlando. And then World Vision kicked in to help buy the remaining water pipe that was still needed to finish the project.

 

People digging

 

At the end of 2023—14 years after he helped form El Triunfo’s ADESCO—Brother Orlando helped form a new Water and Sanitation Administrative Board of El Triunfo, and enlisted ENLACE to train its members. For his great commitment and trustworthy character Brother Orlando was elected as Treasurer of the new Water Board.

 

Today, church and community leaders are at work connecting the water distribution network to every home. Each homeowner must build a grease trap and sump pit for greywater treatment to be eligible for water service. The community works with a harmony that would’ve been difficult to achieve had this been their first project. 

 

Adding underground pipes for water

 

Brother Orlando thanked God repeatedly as he recounted this story for World Water Day. He wiped away tears as he remembered taking church member Sister Reina to the hospital, close to death caused by contaminated water. He remembered Sister María twisting her ankle in the mountains walking for water, and everyone getting sick and walking 10 kilometers to the clinic, managing their vomiting and diarrhea along the way.

 

Salvadorans with a thumbs up

 

Never again. And we pray that Brother Orlando will never again wonder if growing up without a dad would result in parental shortcomings. With God as his Father, the prayers of his church community, and ENLACE as a guide, Brother Orlando is not only a loving father at home, but also a trusted ADESCO President, Water Board Treasurer, and now pastor of a new church, God of Justice Church in El Zúngano, where the adventure of loving his neighbors begins again.