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Pueblo a Pueblo Blog

Right from Santiago Atitlán to your computer. Your window into our world. Thanks for reading and comments are welcome! ​

Sanitation Improvements for a Healthier Agua Escondida

9/3/2018

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PictureView of Lake Atitlán from an overlook in Agua Escondida
Agua Escondida
The community of Agua Escondida sits on the eastern edge of Lake Atitlán in the western highlands of Guatemala. Residents have an impressive view of the area’s three prominent volcanoes from their mountainside vantage point, but few tourists travel to this side of the lake. Minimal traffic makes for a tranquil existence, but it also means that Agua Escondida cannot benefit from the vital flow of income and resources that come with visitors, especially foreign visitors. The community’s isolation therefore means that the residents of Agua Escondida often do not have the resources they need to meet their public and personal needs.
​

Sanitation is one of those basic personal needs. Without access to water and adequate bathroom facilities, community members struggle to preserve their own health and the health of their children. Despite parents’ best efforts to provide a sanitary environment at home, the children of Agua Escondida have to contend with poor sanitation infrastructure every time they use the bathroom at school.

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Agua Escondida Primary School
Current conditions at Agua Escondida Primary School
Agua Escondida Primary School is the community’s only school. It is attended by 590 students from Kindergarten through high school. The school has five functioning toilets for almost 600 students. In other words, there are approximately 89 female students per toilet and 162 male students per toilet, making it impossible for school staff to keep bathrooms clean or stocked with toilet paper or soap. This ratio is over three times higher than the ratio the World Health Organization considers to be safe for students’ health.(1) Students at Agua Escondida often don’t have the privacy they need when they use the bathroom—many of the toilets are not separated by walls or enclosed by doors, and only some of the facilities are separated by gender. These conditions make for such an unpleasant experience that students often avoid using the toilets at all.
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Agua Escondida students also have no way to clean their hands at school. The school’s only hand washing station lacks soap and frequently lacks running water; it is often filled with dirty water due to poor drainage; and its sink is too high for the youngest students to reach. Many students know how important it is to wash their hands with soap and water, but they have no way to act on this knowledge, which leaves them vulnerable to parasites and communicable disease. Proper hand washing has been found to reduce diarrheal disease incidence by 31%, but the students of Agua Escondida can’t take advantage of this protection.(2)
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An abandoned hand washing station
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A bathroom with non-functioning toilet is used for storage
What is at stake?
The area these students call home carries a heavy burden of poverty. In the department of Sololá, where Agua Escondida is located, 94% of residents are food insecure and 34.6% of adult residents cannot read or write.(3) Education is a precious resource in Guatemala, but without access to adequate sanitation facilities, young students in Agua Escondida often become ill from parasites or diarrheal diseases. When they get sick, students miss school, perform poorly in class, or even drop out. For young members of the Agua Escondida community who are already facing substantial barriers to obtaining an education, this is a grave loss.

What our team plans to do
Our Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) team has devised a construction plan in collaboration with school officials to meet the school's sanitation needs. First, the team will demolish a bank of three abandoned toilet stalls and replace them with five new stalls and a new hand washing station. They will then replace a second existing bank of toilet stalls with five new student stalls, a stall for teachers, and a second hand washing station. These improvements will double the number of usable toilets at Agua Escondida—and they will finally give students a place to wash their hands!

These improvements will benefit not only the students of Agua Escondida, but also their families and the community as a whole. Healthy kids are more successful in school, and better sanitation facilities at school means fewer parasitic infections and diarrheal diseases circulating throughout the community. Sanitation improvements at Agua Escondida will make school a place where students can focus on learning, playing, and having fun—just like all kids should be able to do!

How you can help
A contribution to this project is an investment in the health and education of the kids who will become the next generation of leaders in their community. Please consider supporting our WASH collaboration with Agua Escondida Primary School. To donate, just click here and enter “WASH at Agua Escondida” in the notes, or contact us at communications@puebloapueblo.org!

(1) "
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Standards for Schools in Low-cost Settings." Eds. Adams et al., 2009, World Health Organization.
(2) "Hand washing promotion for preventing diarrhoea." eLibrary of Evidence for Nutrition Actions (eLENA), World Health Organization.
(3) "The Republic of Guatemala." 2014, National Institute of Statistics.
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Rainwater Collection at Patzilin Ab'aj

9/3/2018

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A student uses rainwater to wash her hands
“I think that water is the most essential thing because the 201 students we serve use water every day. I believe that this project has been a success for the day-to-day existence of our students, because water is constantly, fundamentally necessary. I therefore believe that this project has made a difference in the lives of our students.”
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Caín

​Caín Barán Quievac is the principal of Patzilin Ab’aj Primary School. As an advocate for children’s health and hygiene in a community where running water is scarce, he has a difficult job. During the course of Pueblo a Pueblo’s two-year partnership with Patzilin Ab’aj, Caín has worked alongside our Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) team to carry out a number of infrastructure improvements. They most recent of these was the installation of a rainwater collection system that brings water to students when other sources fail them.
Pablo Ignacio Eulogio de Sancha is the coordinator of WASH projects at Pueblo a Pueblo and a firm believer in the power of rainwater collection. While diverting rainwater is a common enough practice in the Lake Atitlán region, he says, most residents do it as a defensive measure, to prevent flooding, and they do not take advantage of the water they collect. A system intentionally designed to capture rainwater for use in a home or school, on the other hand, can meet a meaningful portion of a community’s water needs. Given local rainfall averages here on Lake Atitlán, an effective system can collect up to 240 liters of rainwater in a single day!
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Pablo
Pablo agrees with Caín as to the centrality of water to student life. “At Patzilin Ab’aj, students have an garden, they eat their lunch made in the school kitchen, they use the bathroom,” he says. “That means they need water."

PictureWire mesh stops leaves from entering the water tank
Installing the system
In April, Pablo and his team went to work. First, they installed a new water collection tank where it would be most useful—right between the bathrooms and the school kitchen. They then installed new tubing to connect the gutter of a large roof section to the tank. Finally, they placed wire mesh over the gutter to keep out leaves and other organic debris.



​What's next for Patzilin Ab'aj

After contributing some key material resources and technical expertise, Pablo and his team will be stepping back into the role of strategic support during the upcoming year. Now, with water flowing through the pipes of Patzilin Ab’aj, Caín is ready to lead his school through the next step: “Now my students want to use the bathrooms, they’re using the new sinks to wash their hands all by themselves—bit by bit we’re implementing good hygienic habits.”

The new rainwater collection system has been a relief to Caín because it has allowed him to retire a school policy that required students to carry water with them from home each day. “Before these improvements, students often had to make trips home for water, which was dangerous for them,” he says. Although this policy was a choice Caín felt compelled to make in the interest of his students’ health, he is glad that the new water collection system has relieved his students and their families of this heavy burden.

Rain makes the garden grow
School hygiene isn’t the only way rainwater will contribute to his students’ health. Patzilin Ab’aj recently started an organic garden in collaboration with Pueblo a Pueblo’s School Health and Nutrition program. The garden will produce vegetables that students can take home to their families, adding nutritional value to a diet that can become sparse during the months when family income from the once-yearly coffee harvest runs out. Now that Patzilin Ab’aj is collecting rainwater, students can water their vegetables even on dry days—and look forward to a nutritious harvest.

“It is a child’s right to exist in a healthy environment, to keep himself or herself clean, to feel good,” says Caín. With rainwater flowing through their school’s pipes, Caín and his school are one step closer to a healthier Patzilin Ab’aj!
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Raise a Glass for Clean Drinking Water

3/22/2018

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March 22 is World Water Day, and we have some real successes to celebrate this year.   

Our Water and Sanitation Hygiene (WASH) in Schools Project has several goals. In addition to improving bathroom facilities and training the community on maintenance and the importance of practicing bathroom hygiene, WASH also focuses on making safe drinking water accessible to students in rural schools.

Since WASH has initiated, we have partnered with 10 rural schools to improve sanitations facilities, provide drinking water, and train students on the importance of healthy hygiene habits!
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One of these schools is Nueva Vida Primary School. Pablo Eulogio, our WASH Project Coordinator, has been developing and testing water filters made out of coffee grounds (you can read more about this here). We use this filter in the office, and we have just delivered a water filtering system to Nueva Vida Primary School so they can filter tap water into safe drinking water.

"The high temperatures, physical education class, and the overall energy it takes to be a kid leads
students to drink tap water without realizing that it is not safe to do so" said Pablo, "it’s very important to provide students with a safe source of potable water so they can  hydrate without getting sick" he added.

Filtering drinking water is especially important in rural communities like the ones we work in. Twenty-one percent of households do not treat water before drinking it.* Outdated infrastructure and limited access to clean running water result in the many risks of drinking contaminated water.

​The most common consequence are parasites and diarrheal disease, health problems that often lead to students missing school, and can even lead to death. The UN estimates that globally, nearly 1,000 children a day die due to preventable water and sanitation-related diarrhoeal diseases. Unsafe drinking water, lack of access to clean water, and inadequate sanitation facilities all contribute these losses.
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On this World Water Day, let’s celebrate the successes we’ve made towards ensuring that every child has access to safe drinking water--water that keeps them hydrated, healthy and ready to learn. We at Pueblo a Pueblo promise to continue working with rural communities to create healthy environments for students. Let’s raise a glass to clean drinking water!

*2017 Guatemalan National Institute of Statistics
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  • HOME
  • ABOUT US
    • OUR MISSION
    • OUR TEAM
    • BOARD OF DIRECTORS
    • OUR SUPPORTERS >
      • COFFEE INDUSTRY PARTNERS
    • Annual Report
    • FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY >
      • AUDITS & FORMS 990
    • Partnership with Natik
    • Our COVID-19 Response
  • PROGRAMS
    • WHAT WE DO
    • WOMEN'S RIGHT TO HEALTH >
      • MATERNAL CHILD HEALTH
      • WOMEN'S HEALTH CHAMPIONS
    • SCHOOL HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND NUTRITION >
      • WATER, SANITATION, AND HYGIENE IN SCHOOLS
      • PRIMARY EDUCATION SCHOLARSHIPS
      • PATHWAYS TO LITERACY
      • SCHOOL NUTRITION
      • ORGANIC TEACHING GARDEN
    • SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS >
      • BEEKEEPING
      • YOUTH LEADERSHIP
      • WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS
  • BLOG
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    • IN THE NEWS
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