Self-Help Assists El Jicaro in Providing Clean Water to the Community

By Orlando Jose Montiel Salas | Clean Water Program Officer

With the assistance of Self-Help International in Nicaragua, the 115 homes and 446 people who live in the community of El Jícaro have had access to clean water since September 2024.

Since then, because of Self-Help Nicaragua’s efforts, the people of El Jícaro drink safe water, improving their health and personal hygiene.

El Jícaro is in one of the most remote and difficult to areas to reach in southeast Nicaragua, approximately 65 miles from the offices of Self-Help in San Carlos.

The region’s tropical climate means that rain is constant and abundant. Despite its climate and remoteness, Self-Help first brought its clean water program to the community in 2014 to impress upon the people of El Jícaro the importance of water chlorination. However, at that time, there was no interest in the program on the part of the directors of the Committee of Drinking Water and Health. (CAPS as the Spanish acronym for local water organizations.)

But 10 years later, in 2024, a new CAPS board of directors took charge and was aware of the importance of chlorinating water and began to look for options to acquire an affordable way to counter the health problems the community faced from consuming poor-quality water.

Because of the abundant rainfall in the region, there was an adequate supply of water, but the water was contaminated, so the CAPS directors began to look for chlorination options to treat the water. CAPS directors learned that the clean water program of Self-Help International was the best option because of its low cost and Self-Help’s program to educate those community members who were interested in learning good management practices for the installation and maintenance of a chlorination system. 

The CAPS directors in El Jícaro reached out to Self-Help’s Clean Water program technician Orlando Montiel and requested that he provide the necessary support to obtain the water chlorination system to correct the community’s long-running problem with poor quality drinking water so the people of El Jícaro didn’t continue to suffer health problems.

Montiel responded immediately to help El Jícaro install a chlorination system and, as of September 2024, the community enjoys having good quality drinking water. Montiel showed the CAPS directors how chlorine is applied to the water and is then distributed by pipe to the homes in the community. Currently, El Jícaro has a chlorination device made with PVC materials that is designed to capture water from two sources, one by gravity and one by using a pump. The two water sources can be chlorinated simultaneously when they enter a distribution basin, which allows the purification of approximately 18,370 liters (4,853 gallons) daily.

Because of the training that Self-Help provides to the members of the board of directors of CAPS in El Jícaro, good management practices of the chlorinator have been applied. Also, the training has led to an improvement in calculating the use of water by each consumer, which has resulted in an improvement in the water system’s financial resources because water consumers pay according to what they use.  With assistance of Self-Help, CAPS members now feel that they have the tools and knowledge to make better decisions and they are thankful for Self-Help’s support. The people of El Jícaro know that they can count on Self-Help to lend a helping hand either by phone calls or personalized assistance. 

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