2007 Update
NICARAGUA UPDATE
What's happening in Nicaragua in 2007? And how have things improved in Limon?
The two pieces 'A Day in the Life' and 'Protesting for the Right to a Water Supply' were written in June 2005. They gave a graphic account of what it's like to have to live without clean water on tap, and of how people in the rural community of El Limon were dealing with the water crisis they faced. They had launched a public protest and were planning a new independent communal water system.
Dramatic changes
Since then things have changed dramatically both in Limon and in the Nicaraguan government.
Limon's water system
Starting with Limon itself, in 2006-7 the inhabitants built the water system they had been planning. Affordable clean water runs through a network of pipes buried alongside the road and pathways.
Now, for the first time in their lives, all 150 inhabitants have a tap in or very near their houses. They no longer have to depend on the unreliable, contaminated river to wash themselves and their clothes in.
And gone will be the days when, however old or ill they were, they had to carry water every day from the well (up to a mile away) for cooking and drinking.
How it works
The water comes from a well and is pumped to a large holding tank, high enough up for the water to flow by gravity to each house. An elected community committee is coordinating the whole project. They have appointed and pay a community member to look after the day-to-day running of the system.
They are not dependent on any private or public organisation. And they aren't at the mercy of unreliable rainfall, just one of the features of climate change that creates havoc for them.
System pays for itself
Funding for the project came from outside but from now on the system will pay for itself with each household paying the cost price of the water they use.
It's turning out to be more expensive than originally thought - a family's monthly water supply now costs up to a week's wages in the nearby cigar factory. This is because they're currently needing to use a diesel-powered generator, which costs quite a bit more than electricity would. (The Spanish multinational company Union Fenosa which provides Nicaragua's electricity supply has refused to connect the system without the community paying $10,000.)
But the benefits of clean running water are so enormous that it looks like people are prepared to accept this.
Elbia's and Carlos's lives have been transformed (see A Day in the Life). 75 year old Doña Rosa can wash her family's clothes at home now, instead of trekking down to the river daily in all weathers. 16 year old Alyeris is unlikely to develop the chronic pain in her elbows and neck that her mother suffers from after years of carrying buckets of water from the well or river. And all the elderly people and children are now less prone to the skin and gastric infections they used to get by bathing in contaminated water.
Obviously these advantages aren't available to other rural communities unless outside funding is available, as it was in Limon. But this leads on to what's happening at the highest levels in Nicaragua.
A new government
In November 2006 for the first time since 1991, a president was elected who has made the welfare of the majority of Nicaraguans central to his policies. As in the US, presidents aren't inaugurated until the January following an election. So these are early days and Daniel Ortega may have a hard time dealing with the humanitarian crisis he is faced with in the country. But there is now hope.
The legacy of debt and free market policies
Nicaragua was impoverished enough to be one of the 18 countries granted debt relief by the G8 in 2005. This only happened because the government had by then agreed, year after year, to open its markets to free trade policies and to keep cutting the amount it spent on public services.
The result - 70% of the population living on less than $2 per day and nearly 50% on less than $1 a day, with no welfare benefits of any description. For the majority of families, access to schooling and healthcare was either a luxury or a distant dream.
Zero Hunger
So far Ortega has managed not alienate the US and the business community but he has set in motion radical solutions to the poverty that blights the country. In particular he has instituted a Zero Hunger policy.
Spearheading this is Orlando Nunez Soto, a man who has pioneered low tech solutions to rural poverty for years at CIPRES, an institute in the capital, Managua, which provides models for sustainable animal husbandry, energy production and water conservation. Nunez will be working on action to enable small farmers to stay on the land and grow their own food.
What about water?
In another remarkable move, Ortega has appointed Ruth Herrera to run the state water company, ENACAL. Ms Herrera has spent years campaigning against water privatisation and will obviously do what she can to reduce the threat of water privatisation which has been hanging over the country for some time now.
It's too soon to know how this will benefit the rural majority, who - like the people of Limón - are faced with increasing threats to their water supply. The effects of climate change are not going to go away.
But it's a lack of investment in an affordable and sustainable water supply that leads to so much hardship. And the new government is starting off with a clear indication that it's going to do what it can to get accessible clean water to its citizens.
Keeping up with what's happening in Nicaragua
Unlike Venezuela, whose president Hugo Chavez gets into the watching world's headlines almost weekly, Nicaraguan affairs rarely appear on our screens or in our newspapers. But there's a weekly update on Nicaragua at
where you can get news of what's going on there.