In 2002 when our first group of medical volunteers came to Honduras to investigate ways to have an impact on the health in our region, they selected the municipality of San Juan de Opoa, Copan as a target site that they could help. At first, much of our focus was clinical, in cooperation with the local health authorities, but due to the very short term nature of our medical teams, we quickly discovered that in our case, this was not the most efficient use of time or resources.
Our focus began to shift to education and water. Attacking the source rather than the symptoms seemed a logical course to take, and much of the problems that we were dealing with clinically were the results of lack of access to clean water. While most people know that boiling water predominantly purifies it, few take the time to try to eliminate those organisms that aren't visible to the eye. If they can't see it, it cannot exist. So, we began a cooperation with the municipality to provide clean water to their urban centers -- the town of San Juan de Opoa itself plus the villages under their management.
In the town of San Juan de Opoa, we provide the HTH chlorine that is injected into their urban water supply via basic chlorinators sitting on top of their 2 large water storage tanks. 
The municipality obtained the collaboration of the district health department to determine the dosages and perform water tests, and PLAN Honduras helped out by fixing up the chlorinators. We then agreed to raise funds to pay for the materials for some wells in villages with inadequate access to water. The local residents are required to dig the wells by hand and the municipality provides a qualified instructor to show them how to properly case the well with bricks to protect the quality of water and the health department provided the manual pumps. The first two wells went into a community called Santa Helena. Two more wells went into a village called El Pinal.
That left 2 communities still in need in this municipality. Plan Honduras agreed to deal with one and we took on the other -- a 3.5km pipeline to a small village named Ceiba Rabona. This spring we took a group to visit the village to see the prospective project and they returned to Canada with the mission to raise the $22,000 to pay for the materials and engineering required. The existing water supply was a small trickle of very dirty water. Other than that, the residents of this village had to walk 1/2 a kilometer down the side of the valley to the river and haul equally nasty water back up to their home.
Again, the local residents are the ones who performed the manual labor of building the structures involved, while our budget this time included the experienced foremen to ensure that the project was properly built. The design is for a 20 year capacity, so we wanted to make sure that the quality of the construction would provide water for more than a few months. The project pipes water from an elevation of 1000 meters down the side of one valley, strapped to the cables of a swinging bridge to cross a river and then back up the other side of the valley. Included are:
- source protector casing station
- sand removal station - 3m x 1m located about 100 meters downhill from the source
- 3 pressure reduction stations -1.5m x 1m located at 300m, 800m and 1,300m from the source
- 5,000 US gallon tank - 4m in diameter x 2m high located 3.1km from the source
- 2,700m of 2 inch PVC tubing
- 800m of heavy guage steel tubing
- distribution network using PVC piping to 18 residences
The community of Ceiba Rabona currently holds about 100 residents, a small one room school and an even smaller church. There is no electricity in this community and likely won't be for years to come. In fact, there is no road to this village, so access by automobile is impossible, making transport of project materials a very significant complication. There are 2 routes to the village. The one we take involves driving in a big loop to arrive on the south side of the river. 
Then we leave our 4x4's in a village there and walked down a valley, across a swinging bridge and up the other side. You only walk about a mile, but due to the terrain, it takes around 30 minutes. The other route is more direct, but the road (4x4's only) ends about 2 hours from the village and you get to wander paths through the mountains to get there. That is the route that the residents normally take -- in early September all the men from the village set out at 5:30am and walked for almost 4 hours to come to a project training session in San Juan de Opoa. At the end of the session, they headed home again.
Dengue and hurricanes caused some delays in construction, but fortunately struck more or less simultaneously. Hurricane Stan shut down the roads between Guatemala City and Honduras, so we could not get in the heavy steel piping that we needed for where the water has too much pressure for PVC. While I ranted and raved at the hardware store to do everything they could since it would delay us, half the village went down with Dengue (kind of like malaria) and were unable to work for 3 weeks. However, despite the challenges and delays, we were ecstatic to have the grand ceremony on November 16, 2005 to inagaurate the system -- complete with local politicians and a fine group of gringos from Canada. Most importantly, the people now have a good source of plentiful water and they do not have to spend an hour to go get it just to wash the dishes after a meal...
