Water
High in Peru’s Andes Mountains, Maria Montalvo Arce grows grapes.
Well, most years she grows grapes. A year ago, the worst flooding Peru has experienced in a lifetime washed away nearly all of Maria’s harvest. The rain lasted for a month.
Don Ángel went from being a zoologist who worked with livestock to leading the water and sanitation office in the province of Gran Chimu de Cascas in Peru.
The late afternoon sun starts turning golden as Julia, Daniel, and Kimberly play in the fields surrounding their home just outside of Asunción, Peru. Their life is simple and sweet, and they like it that way. Their mom, Luz, says life didn’t always feel like this.
On any given day, as she sees her kids off to school or prepares food for her family, Maureen could get a call from a community in her region. She’d drop everything in that moment, grab her tools, and head off on her bicycle.
“It was like a dream to us,” says Lilian. She says the people in her community never thought they would have safe water. “We used to wake up very early in the morning to go fetch water,” Lilian says. She and others in her community in Gicumbi District, Rwanda would lose hours each day walking to fetch water for the day’s tasks.
Sweetly sleeping, two-year-old Solange lays contentedly in her mom’s arms. Marie Louise’s other children are at school. This scene, almost serene, feels very different from what Marie Louise says life looked like a few years ago. A few years ago, her village didn’t have a safe water source.
Beatrice and her neighbors have an acute understanding of the value of time. Three years ago, women and children in her community of Ngoma in Rulindo District, Rwanda, were losing hours every day fetching water from an unprotected spring.
When Maria Lopez decided to move in with her husband’s family to the rural community of Nueva Esperanza in San Antonio de Cortés, Honduras, the residents there were on the verge of naming it “El Olvido”- the forgotten place.
The community of Pachoj in Guatemala is 15 miles from the nearest town and challenging to get to – in the rainy season the trek to this tiny town can include more than a mile of walking along muddy roads that often become unpassable for cars. Because access to the town is so difficult, Pachoj lacks basic services like drinking water, sanitation, and electricity.
Priscilla works at a health center in Kamwenge District, Uganda. She is the nurse in charge of the clinic and is responsible for ensuring any community members who need health services can receive them. When Priscilla started working at the clinic, there was no access to reliable and safe water, which made caring for patients very challenging.
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