The importance of water

This week, I went into the field twice and something new stroke me; the importance of water in a zone. Last Tuesday I went on a fieldtrip to Terrabona, a very dry zone in the North of Nicaragua. We visited several health centres to see if the fourth and last WFP distribution of this year went well by talking to the beneficiaries and coordinators. Afterwards I visited the mayor of the municipality for a market study we are currently conducting nationally. I talked to him about the main economic activities in Terrabona, the market prices and export products. He explained to me that many communities did not have water and could therefore not cultivate their land. People did not have a lot of income and did not have the land nor the opportunity to produce food for themselves. This meant that many families do not have enough  food to eat and are therefore malnutrioned. Many people in this zone live on one meal a day! This was rather shocking to me, because I have been to places that seemed far more poor; people here often had electricity, a latrine and a brick house, while people in Rio Bocay did not have anything. However, the difference is that people in Rio Bocay had fertile land that they could cultivate which supplied them with food. But these people work during the coffee time (four months a year) and earn 5$ a day in these months. The rest of the year most of them do not have any income...

The second fieldtrip I made was to the municipality of Jinotega where we conducted interviews with community leaders who applied for a new TNT school. To explain this program a bit more; TNT will donate several schools in 2011 and it is our job to identify which communities are in the most need for a (new) school. One community we visisted did not appear poor at all; the school and the road were in a good condition, people had brick houses and there was electricity in the village. When conducting the interview with the community leader, I actually believed that the community was not in a desperate need for a new school. However, when I asked the leader about the percentage of children who were malnutritioned in the community she answered that almost are children were malnutrioned. The same story as Terrabona applies here; the community did not have immediate access to water. People had to walk three times a day for five (!) kilometres to fetch water. Because of this, many children were not able to go to school because they had to fetch water and families did not have fertile land to cultivate, because the zone was too dry. Result: no work, no income, no food.

Seeing this made me realize two things; the importance of water and the fact that the first appearance of a community is not always right, meaning that some communities do not appear poor, but when you take a closer look they are in fact poorer than many villages in Rio Bocay.