13,577 homes in Nicaragua now have clean water!

By Orlando Montiel Salas

As of April 2018, we have made 10 visits to the rural communities of San Miguelito, El Castillo, Nueva Guinea, and San Carlos. At these visits, we performed inspections and technical follow-up at MAG and MABE aqueducts. In El Castillo, we held a CAPS leadership training, in Nueva Guinea we collected the UTM coordinates of CTI-8, in Boca de Sábalos we installed a CTI-8 chlorinator, and in all of the communities we promoted the clean water program. We also held the fourth seminar for CAPS leaders in the Fred W. Strohbehn CECAL Training Center in Quinta Lidia.

We visited the MAG aqueduct in the Santa María community in San Miguelito. We were able to perform a technical inspection for the possible installation of a CTI-8 chlorinator to treat their water. We agreed to revisit the community at a later date to help them make the decision whether or not to use the CTI-8 and improve water quality.

We held a training for the CAPS leaders of 5 communities from the municipality of El Castillo: Buena Vista, Marlon Zelaya, Mauricio Gutiérrez, Laureano Mairena, and Boca de Sábalos. Twenty-five people attended, five women and twenty men, and were trained on how to calculate the drinking water fee rate and how to properly manage the money they collect. Two technicians from City Hall participated, and Orlando Montiel was there on behalf of Self-Help as a trainer.

The community assembly in Salvadorita, a village in the Nueva Guinea municipality, was a huge success. The objective of the meeting was to explain how the CTI-8 makes a difference in the quality of water and the health of the people who consume it. They were very interesting in installing the CTI-8, so we will visit again later to install it, according to the decision of the CAPS leaders.

We collected UTM coordinates at our chlorinators in Nueva Guinea. We like to collect the exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the chlorinators so we have specific locations and can map our progress!

We were able to perform a technical inspection of the water tank in the Cerro Lindo community, a technical follow-up for the CTI-8 in Los Laureles, Providencia, we collected PAL funds from CAPS Nuevo León, and promoted the CTI-8 in the communities of El Sábalo, El Verdún, and Las Miradas, of Nueva Guinea and El Almendro, respectively.

A CTI-8 manual chlorinator was installed inside the water tank in Boca de Sábalos, El Castillo. This chlorinator is disinfecting 32,000 liters of water per day, which reaches 1,500 people living in 200 homes. This community is the municipal seat, a place where many surrounding rural communities converge for trade, transportation, and where local authorities are located – in other words, this clean water will benefit more people than just the residents.

The Nueva Jerusalén community in San Carlos has a MABE aqueduct. We conducted a technical inspection to learn more about their water treatment situation. This community reported that they were not chlorinating the water because their electric chlorinator was damaged, so we came with the objective of promoting the CTI-8 manual chlorinator to replace it. It is worth mentioning that this community has two aqueducts, one MABE and the other MAG, to serve its population. We are still awaiting a decision from the CAPS leaders on the installation of a CTI-8.

The Hospital of San Carlos uses a small internal water pump system to distribute the water to different storage tanks which correspond to the various departments and units at the hospital, pumping water directly to the pipes and to the kitchen. This is helpful if they have an emergency need for clean water and it is outside of the service hours of ENACAL, the water company. The purpose of the inspection was to study the possibility of installing a new CTI-8 manual chlorinator, which works using water pressure and would provide chlorine to the entire distribution pipe inside the Hospital.

7 CAPS leaders from the communities of Mexico, Caracito, Empalme de Cruz Verde, Quinta Lidia and Santa Isabel, and El Rótulo-Nueva Armenia, attended an advanced leader seminar in which they were trained on technical study, organization, and legal aspects of rural drinking water projects. This was the fourth training module as part of the follow-up of the Rural Drinking Water Development Project.

In April 2018, the total amount of funds recovered from the clean water program was C$9,560 córdobas, all as collected debts, while one CTI-8 chlorinator and 5 chlorine tablets left outstanding balance C$3,600 córdobas.

The installation of the CTI-8 manual chlorinator in the Boca de Sábalos community of El Castillo increased the total number of people served with clean water to 125,167, with a total of 116 chlorinators that are purifying 2,896.64m³ of water every day and distributing that clean and safe water to 13,577 homes in rural communities in Río San Juan, Nueva Guinea, Muelle de los Bueyes, and Villa Sandino.