Cerro Los Pardos, Nicaragua – A young Nicaraguan boy enjoys a new water storage tank that helps his family and community gain access to safe, clean water. Photo: Antoinette Lloyd-Evans/CWS
With more than a billion people worldwide lacking clean water and more than 2.1 million people most of them children dying each year from waterborne disease, water cannot be taken for granted. In a recent visit to eastern Nicaragua, Church World Service Michigan staff Antoinette Lloyd-Evans and several colleagues met with partner CIEETS (Interchurch Center of Theological and Social Studies). Since nearly half the Nicaraguan population lives in poverty, CWS is working with CIEETS to improve the lives of rural families. Through this partnership, some 200 families in 10 communities in La Conquista and Santa Teresa municipalities, Carazo department, are gaining skills in sustainable agriculture and learning new techniques for food production that are vital for better health and nutrition.
These families have also gained access to clean water through a CWS supported food security and nutrition program that uses gravity to bring safe water from water sources in the mountains to villages below. Before the partnership with CWS and CIEETS, children and women had to walk for hours and miles to get water from a creek that was contaminated. Now with access to clean water, parents in these rural Nicaraguan communities are able to provide their children with clean water and are also enabled to produce food that provides their children with a well balanced nutritious diet. They now use their time for educational, household or income producing activities. These communities have seen a vast improvement in their overall health and in the quality of their lives.
Thanks to the support of you, our generous benefactors, CWS-sponsored programs are helping communities around the globe to increase food production by teaching them sound agricultural practices and the appropriate uses of new technology and skills as well as ways to protect and sustain their land/water resources. Your support also allows entire communities to develop income-producing projects that help offset future threats of hunger.