Offgrid WASH solutions
The fundamental importance of water in communities often hides in places unseen, in bathrooms, in sewage systems, in wells and in the groundwater. However, in El Astillero our relationship with water is a little different and it's full of challenges. The community water system is often down due to electricity blackouts or a faulty generator. Dirty water flows onto the streets and is drunk by pigs and cows. Sewage, if it isn't buried in a hole, also flows into the streets and chemical runoff from the fields also does its best to pollute the groundwater. Our WASH program is modest, yet it tries to tackle all of these challenges with targeted and appropriate action.
So far we have…
Sponsored a research on water quality in El Astillero
Procured 390 clean water filters
Restored 50 community wells
Installed 26 rainwater collection tanks
Built 22 bathrooms with biodigester tanks
Our WASH project emerged out of an urgent need. What do we do with our dirty water and how can these solutions be replicated around the town of El Astillero? We also wanted to be able to use our well, which was rundown, dirty, salty, and we suspected it was also severely polluted. As our relationship with water was identical to other community members, we realized the immense difficulty that they faced in order to have clean drinking water. The town of El Astillero needs to have two approaches to Water and sanitation. In the short term, we need to contain water pollution and ensure access to clean drinking water. In the long term, we need to measure the quality of the groundwater and try to reduce or eliminate contamination all together.
We have begun to measure the level of phosphates, nitrates and oxygen levels in all of the wells in El Astillero, to get an idea of the quality of water and also to better understand how this data can fluctuate over time. Anielka, our agroecology coordinator suggested we create a subsidy program for water tanks and pumps, this would improve access to clean drinking water when the centralized system was down and we also distributed water filters to almost every household in El Astillero. We cleaned all the wells in the community, including the original communal well which had become an extremely dirty and contaminated site in the forest.