Bringing Clean Water to All

The people of Suriel, a small village in central Dominican Republic, don’t have indoor plumbing. Seeking water, they walk down the only road to an aqueduct along the village’s outskirts that’s available for use only five and a half hours every other day.

This aqueduct, their only source of water, becomes polluted somewhere between the source spring and their water supply. The contaminated water has caused outbreaks of diarrhea, worms, and other waterborne illnesses among the villagers, according to Harvard College Engineers Without Borders President Jacqueline E. Stenson ‘08. Concerned about this public health problem at a time when the UN has officially declared 2008 as the “International Year of Sanitation,” Stenson, along with dozens of other Harvard undergraduates, has traveled to villages like Suriel in developing regions around the world to educate villagers about how to improve their local sanitation systems and create clean water supplies.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: ENGINEERING

Founded last spring, Harvard College Engineers Without Borders was started with the goal of designing sustainable solutions to problems that developing countries around the world face. Doctors Without Borders helped the group find their first project, a water-focused mission in the mountainous region of Constanza in central Dominican Republic.

Engineers Without Borders made their first trip to Suriel over Veterans Day weekend in November 2007.

“Everyone in the community was really receptive and willing,” says Water Committee chair Dana R. Lazarus ‘09. “It was great how welcoming they were, though they’re living in terrible poverty.”

Stenson recalls visiting a small house with three rooms each “only about the size of a typical Harvard bedroom.” The house was shared by nine people.

Lazarus’ committee is charged with implementing sustainable water storage and finding the source of the aqueduct contamination.

The group says it hopes to return to Suriel over the summer for eight days to make further assessments and implement an educational plan, which will involve lessons in safe water practices and sanitation.

The Harvard Engineers have raised donations from corporations and received a grant from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Members of the group say that one obstacle that they have encountered has been trying to obtain information about a rural community more than 1,500 miles away in the Dominican Republic while remaining on campus in Cambridge.

But Lazarus says that their project is important enough to pursue despite any challenges they face.

“We’re helping a community where they wouldn’t otherwise have clean water,” Lazarus says. “And we’re getting out of Harvard.”

Others speak of the excitement of putting their foreign language and academic studies to practice.

“It’s really exciting to work in Spanish and to explore a different culture, as well as practice our engineering skills,” says Elena C. Castaneda ’08, a native Spanish speaker who heads the Construction Committee, which she describes as building “easy, sustainable, inexpensive wells.”

NICARAGUA: SUSTAINABILITY

The Harvard Project for Sustainable Development (HPSD) discovered a similar water sanitation problem in Los Jobos, Nicaragua, a rural community of only 250 people in northern Nicaragua.

The well that supplies the village’s water is contaminated during the rainy season when the local river floods back on to it, according to HPSD Co-President Toby L. Norman ’10. The sustainable development group traveled to Los Jobos over spring break, where they met with community members to discuss their concerns about the water system.

“The program will subsidize the cost of household ceramic water filters that are simple, cheap, and effective at ridding the water of most bacteria,” Norman says, adding that an important part of the project is connecting with the people they work with and forming lasting partnerships with the local communities.

“When you don’t just think technically, but actually connect with other people’s ideas, you can form a solidarity that goes beyond physical projects,” Norman says. “You can really understand them better and they can understand you better.”

This project to improve water conditions in Los Jobos is not HPSD’s only undertaking, as they also work on other ways of alleviating poverty.

This year, the group has dedicated itself to expanding computer literacy in Nicaragua and increasing the number of computers at El Instituto Nacional Francisco Luis Espinoza, a large public school in the nearby city of Esteli that accepts many students from HPSD’s partner communities.

“The school has a total of 1,500 students and only seven slow computers,” says HPSD Co-President Eric A. Meyerowitz ’10.

Meyerowitz adds that since access to dental care in rural Nicaragua is limited, HPSD also plans to educate students, parents, and teachers about dental hygiene and preventative care, such as brushing and flossing.

GHANA: ‘COLLABORATIVE EFFORT’

Sangu J. Delle ’10 and Darryl W. Finkton ’10 were discussing ways to benefit communities outside the Cambridge and Boston area when they thought of Project Access to Clean Water for Agyemanti, a student group founded last spring.

“It’s a privilege to be at Harvard and we feel it’s our moral responsibility to help others,” Delle says.

The small village of Agyemanti, Ghana was chosen because the people of this community do not have access to clean drinking water, Delle says, adding that while only 500 people live in the village, over 1,500 others in neighboring communities will be affected by the improved water conditions.

In addition to grants received from the Department of African and African American Studies and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, the group hopes to raise an additional $25,000.

They plan to construct a borehole with a hand pump to tap into clean water underground.

“Everything was an obstacle. We started from an idea and just kept pushing,” Delle says. “We’d have to wake up at 2 a.m. to call Ghana.”

He says that they plan to fully implement the project with “innovative mechanisms” while in Ghana for eight weeks over the summer.

Delle visited Agyemanti over winter break, where he met with community members and local chiefs, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Water Resources, the Ministry of Finance, WaterAid Ghana and other important players in the planning process.

Delle says that he witnessed firsthand the “deplorable water and sanitary conditions.”

“I drank that water,” Delle says. “It’s one thing to read or hear about it, but another thing to experience it.”

Finkton adds that although the villagers know that the water is unsanitary, they “have no other options.”

Delle and Finkton emphasize that their project is a “collaborative effort” with the Agyemanti village, referring to the fact that the local people built their community school themselves.

The group is also taking a holistic approach to water sanitation that involves constructing boreholes, building latrines, and holding health and sanitation seminars on techniques for storing water.

“Our goal is not only to provide the equipment for obtaining safe water, but the ability to sustain it and the knowledge to understand why and how it should be sustained,” Delle says.

The group will also establish a scholarship fund named after Harvard Professor of History and African American studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.

Molly L. Kile, a lecturer from the Harvard School of Public Health, will supervise the organization’s survey tools and it water sanitation procedures.

“The project was very well researched and there was an acknowledgement of public health benefits,” Kile says.

She adds that, going forward, the clean water project must equally address “water equality, sanitation, and hygiene.”

-Staff writer Brittany M. Llewellyn can be reached at bllewell@fas.harvard.edu.