Project Schoolhouse

Improving Nicaraguan lives by building new, community water systems, and improving sanitation.

Water

Greetings from our Executive Director – Energized for the year ahead

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Dear Friends,

We are excited to have broken ground on a water and latrine project in the community of Mancera Central, returning to that community after collaborating to build a new school building in 2019. As its name suggests, it is the center of a group of smaller villages, with a high school and a health clinic that serves all of those surrounding villages. In these rural communities, high school occurs every Saturday and students take their homework for the rest of the week, to complete after they finish their chores.  Going to high school is quite a commitment, walking or riding a horse for hours from the smaller villages to get to school. It was eye-opening and heart-warming to see the influx of teens that Saturday of our visit. Many of the girls were accompanied by moms or older brothers, for safety. It takes at least 5 years for them to graduate from high school, going only once a week as they do.

In 2019 the community mobilized to build a new school to serve as the primary school during the week, and the high school on Saturdays, just as they are now mobilizing to build a water system to provide safe drinking water for their families.  It was the fastest school we’ve seen come together and that energy is continuing on the water project.

We are so very grateful for the support of The Burdine Johnson Foundation for financially supporting the Mancera Central water project. Their sustaining support over the years has brought safe water to hundreds of families.

We are also grateful and thrilled to report winning our second Rotary International Global Grant! This grant will pay for the water and latrine project in the community of Bilampi, which we will break ground on in early summer 2021. We’re excited to share an interview, below, of KC Cerny, the driving force behind these complex grant applications. In designing this system, our water engineer reported this community having the worst water quality he had ever seen. The families in Bilampi cannot wait to get started. They should have clean water in their homes by the end of the year!

And, in between these 2 water projects, we will collaborate in the community of Malakawas to build a new school, after finishing a water project there last year. In our survey work leading up to commencing this project, we’ve seen the highest level of adult continuing education of all of the communities we’ve worked in previously. It is great to see parents just as eager to continue their education as the children, and they cannot wait to have a new school building in which to study.  

Your support makes all these projects possible. We invite you to one of our upcoming ‘Crash Courses’ to learn more about 2021 projects and the communities where we’ve put your investment to work. I hope to see you there and bring a friend or two to help us spread the word. It would be a huge gift.  

Gratefully,
Selina Serna
Executive Director

Project Update: March 2021

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Clean water is flowing in Mancera, Nicaragua.   The forty families in this small community have been working since December to harness a high elevation spring to bring water to their homes.   

They’ve finished the spring capture process and clean water is flowing downhill through pipes they are currently working to bury in a 2-mile trench to the site of a future storage tank.  Once that first section of the main conduction line is complete, they can start building the 45,000-gallon storage tank that will provide water to their homes.

This is back-breaking work and this particular spring capture was more difficult than average.   Sometimes the springs are easily accessible and not located far from the community they will serve, but in Mancera, the spring is two miles up a formidable mountain accessible only via narrow trails.   All the cement, sand, gravel, and pvc had to be carried on horses, mules, and by hand in the hot sun and, sometimes simultaneously, through deep mud.

I’m continually amazed at the persistence and sheer physical fortitude of the communities we work with.  They spend month after month carrying supplies, digging trenches by hand, and laboring in challenging conditions to get water to their families.  This project is slated to be complete by August of 2021.   

Thank you.

Tab Barker
Director of Operations

Partner Spotlight: KC Cerny, West Austin Rotary Club President

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In describing the work of the West Austin Rotary Club, KC Cerny highlights the service organization’s motto: “Service above Self. ” Over the past few years, KC has truly lived this motto by working tirelessly with Rotary International to help secure two of the largest grants in Project Schoolhouse’s history. Combined, these Rotary International grants funded water projects in three communities. 

Projects in El Aulo and Nueva Jerusalem were completed in 2020 and the third project in Bilampi will break ground in early 2021.  KC has been an active Rotarian since 1990 and is currently the President of the West Austin Rotary Club.  KC and the sponsorship of the West Austin Rotary Club were instrumental Project Schoolhouse winning these grants.  

In a recent conversation with KC, he explained Rotary International is a significant funder of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects around the world and has a long history of advancing efforts to further peace and understanding. Rotary International, founded in 1905, quickly spread around the globe, with clubs in Europe, Asia and South and Central America. In fact, one requirement for securing this global grant was establishing a partnership with a Rotary Club in Nicaragua, which we did in Matagalpa.  The global grant funds for the projects are distributed through the bank accounts of the local Matagalpa Rotary Club.  As KC explains, “Rotary International doesn’t just fund these types of projects, but they get highly involved in them as well.”

In describing his personal connections to the work of Project Schoolhouse, KC reflected on his experiences as a camper.   “If you have ever been camping, you know how important it is to find clean water.”  That’s why when Tab gave a Project Schoolhouse presentation to the West Austin Rotary Club a few years ago he was intrigued.  But KC was not the only West Austin Rotarian who was intrigued by Tab’s presentation: “Several [Rotarians] had positions with major corporations in South America…and they were intrigued by what Tab was talking about.” KC and the other Rotarians connected to the notion of just how vital it is to have clean, running water. They connected to the hardships related to having children walk for miles every day to fill buckets of water from the river or other water sources, how these children miss school and often get sick from drinking unsanitary water. KC and the other Rotarians were also attracted to Project Schoolhouse’s mission to create low-cost and effective water systems that could be installed and maintained by folks living in these rural communities. 

As KC explains, “from a Rotary International standpoint what this means is you’ve got a project that delivers clean water, meaning the disease incidence goes down, the kids get to go to school and people aren’t spending hours just hauling water up the hillside.  You know, you can actually be out working in your fields or gardens…The point here is, it is economically viable and it helps promote the health of the community.  And health has been something that Rotary International has been focused on for decades.”  KC continues, “and having Tab visit Nicaragua on a regular basis is very important to Rotary International for purposes of funding the Global Grant.”

When asked about future collaborations between the West Austin Rotary Club and Project Schoolhouse, KC extended a warm invitation to members of the greater Project Schoolhouse family to attend future Rotary Meetings and consider joining the organization.  And KC expressed excitement about visiting Nicaragua.  Prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, KC planned to visit the sites funded by the Rotary International Grant. After securing public health clearance, KC and his wife plan to lead a team of Rotarians to visit the three villages in the Spring of 2022–”fingers crossed.”

Written by Ana Valente and Kris Sloan

Project Update: Working Through COVID-19

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In spite of the unusual conditions COVID has placed on our work in Nicaragua, projects continue to advance. Our water system in El Aulo is nearing completion as latrines are progressing steadily and the final touches are put on the distribution system. Because the border with Costa Rica has been closed for weeks, one particular material needed for latrines was in short supply.  It has finally arrived, however, and latrine construction has begun again.  All that is left to do is to finish trenching to one final home, install the water meters on all the points of use, and complete the latrines. We hope to have this done by the end of July. 

In Malakawais things are moving along as well as could possibly be hoped for and the project is on schedule. There was one setback as the mold being used to form the concrete blocks for the latrines was damaged, so they will have to use the spare mold that is currently in use in El Aulo but will soon be able to be transferred to Malakawais. Since they are well ahead of schedule for building the blocks for the latrines, however, this won’t hamper their timeline.

We wanted to show you where the families will begin to dig trenches. Below is an image of Selina and me and if you look to the horizon you will see a mountain, the water source for the families in Malakawais.

Tab Barker
Director of Operations

Impact Report: A New Water System for El Aulo

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It’s been a long road to getting water to the community of El Aulo in Nicaragua. Twelve years ago Project Schoolhouse partnered with them to build a three-room schoolhouse but we were unable to build a permanent water system.

Persistent roadblocks involving the availability of springs and uncooperative landowners prevented us and other orgs from being able to assist this community until 2019 when we found a design that would work and got funding from Rotary International and the Burdine Johnson Foundation to finally start work on a water system.

Every project we complete involves serious problem solving and overcoming difficult logistical hurdles, but this project has been exponentially more difficult, even since we began construction in July 2019. One of those obstacles was that the spring providing water to the system was damaged through rogue deforestation and was only going to be able to provide sufficient water for 9 months of the year. On top of aggressive reforestation efforts, we solved this problem through an innovative hybrid system design that involves both a closed spring capture as well as an open water filtration system to provide additional water capacity during the three dry months of the year. To my knowledge, there isn’t another system like this in existence in Nicaragua or further afield.

To break this down, our most common method to harness spring water is to completely seal in the underground water source. This allows us to capture 100% of the spring water, which is already clean and free from contaminants and keep it clean inside a closed system. This is by far the best way to harness water and most of our systems are built like this.

The other way to harness water is to collect surface water with a small dam and then run it through a series of filtration structures to clean it. In El Aulo, we utilized both of these methods to ensure sufficient water to the community for a 30-year design spec accounting for population growth.

This particular open capture is, in my opinion, a work of art and science. Our lead engineer is one of the most respected water engineers in Central America and he built a system that takes water carefully filtered through underground gravel tunnels into another filter involving special fabric and special sand. From there it passes through an ultraviolet filtration process, through two de-sedimentation tanks, and then through another set of special fabric and sand before passing through a chlorination process. At this point the water is triple filtered, double de-sedimented, ultraviolet treated and chlorinated before being stored in a nearly 80,000-gallon storage tank.

The tank is nearly double the normal size in order to make the very best use of the closed capture spring water before turning on the open capture water. Even better, the system has very special controls that allow each part of the system to be turned on or off to allow for regular maintenance and water source management.
It took all the savvy Project Schoolhouse had accumulated in its 15-year history to make this project a reality and I’m thrilled that finally, the community of El Aulo will have a reliable and clean water source after years of carrying water by hand.

Tab Barker
Director of Operations