One year ago, John and I rented a car and headed north past Managua, past Matagalpa, past Esteli and Ocotal and up into the pine forests to the town of Jalapa which sits just shy of the Honduran border.
We spent the night in the countryside, although it was accessed from right in town. Hotel Campestre El Patano. A German man and his blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenage son ran the place, which normally (read: during non-crisis years) is bustling, he said, with mission groups running projects nearby. On this day we were the only ones there.
The next morning a gentleman from the local water district led us on his motorcycle deep into the mountains to the the villages of Los Terrerios and La Luz.
It was a thirty-minute drive on narrow dirt roads through thick pine forests. Pine forests! Trucks laden with freshly cut timber rumbled past us on tight curves.
We were scheduled to meet our son Cliff at one of the two adjoining villages.
While an engineering student at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, he’d volunteered with their Village Aid Project (formerly Engineers Without Borders) in Nicaragua.
He’d already been on two Village Aid Projects in Nicaragua. The last one, the Linda Vista project, had been during Cliff’s senior year, when he had been President of VAP and had also personally designed the entire water distribution system as his senior seminar project.
Cliff designed the Los Terrerios and La Luz project along with two other students.
Unfortunately, they had been scheduled to implement the project in Nicaragua just two weeks after the April 2018 crisis. Their plans were canceled and the project was put on hold.
Flash forward a year to May of 2019. Our son had graduated and turned his three-year internship at La Plata Electric Association in Durango into a full-time job.
The college still didn’t feel safe bringing students to Nicaragua but they wanted to move forward with the project. The two villages were waiting on them after all, and many of the materials had been procured.
So, Don May, who’s on the engineering faculty at Fort Lewis and has been running water and sanitation projects in Nicaragua for years, grabbed Cliff, who took over the design, and two other community members and headed down to oversee the project. The men of the village prepped the land, dug the trenches and helped lay the pipe.
We had no idea of the scope of the project until we got there and saw the scale of it with our own eyes.
Steep mountains. Two valleys. Two villages separated by a mountain pass. Eighty households, some on mountain sides, some on valley bottoms. Think Pressure differences. Distribution.
Eighty households who until then had been carrying water in buckets every day from the river to their homes.
The men of the villages had hand dug 11.8 miles (19 kilometers) of trenches over the mountains. From the water source to two distribution centers on separate mountains to three tanks to eighty taps – one per household.
The villages have no electricity. The villages have a school. And a clinic.
The clinic has one car battery that runs one electric bulb at night.
The clinic had had no running water until the day we arrived to visit our son at the end of the project and the taps were turned on.
We found Don May outside of the clinic where they were staying and he gave us a tour on foot, with a gaggle of school children following, as we searched for our son Cliff who was somewhere on one of the mountains or valleys looking for leaks.
The sun was baking. The dirt roads dusty and steep. After an hour or more, one of the men offered me a ride on his motorcycle, pointing out gold mines in the distance as he and I motored up the hillside.
We met up with our son. We hugged. We scrambled past coffee trees on our way to the water’s source, wondering how anyone can be agile on such steep terrain.
We bought a round of hot coca colas from the lone pulperia at the top of the mountain for the men that were gathered.
Then we returned for a meeting of the villagers and the official formation of their new water district. They thanked Don May and the Village Aid Project.
They thanked our son. And they even thanked and honored John and I for coming and for having him as our son. My eyes grew huge. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so honored in my life. What an incredibly gracious thing. I felt as if I’d looked straight into the heart of God.
The villages. The water. The single light bulb off the car battery at the clinic. The gratitude. The eighty households and our son.
John’s convinced there must’ve been a baby boom this year. All those happy women who no longer had to carry buckets from the river showing their appreciation to their men for 11.8 miles (19 kilometers) worth of ditch.
