Juarez (Huancabamba) Bathroom Project

Greetings to all! I am now back in Piura, Peru where I will be living for the next two or three months. I am staying in the house of Roberto Castillo who is my contact here in Peru. Roberto lives in McDonough Georgia with his wife Mindy and two girls Carol Anne and Emily. In August of this year I was privledeged to come to Peru with his family and my brother Eli. We went all around the area of Piura on a "scouting" trip to see what type of work could be done to help poor people. What we found was two main things.

Most people do not have access to clean water and almost all people who live in the desert region have to walk in excess of two kilometers to obtain water that is still not clean and they must also pay for it. I guess that is how it is when you live in a desert and your government cannot afford to drill public wells and has to charge money for the water that you do have. The second thing that we discovered, was that almost every family lacked the knowledge or ability to practice any type of sanitation. Conditions throughout the region were beyond terrible and very very poor. Peru is known to be the second or third poorest country of South America next to Bolivia and Columbia.

We visited many areas in August and I documented as much as I could about each individual community. We found one village in the mountains in the region of Huancabamba called Juarez which CUBIT decided to do work at, and is where I have been for the past several days arranging a project to build bathrooms. Brad Charles, the president of the CUBIT Foundation accompanied me on the trip and we were able to get much accomplished. When we arrived, we discovered that there was a project that the community had already began, but was on hold because they needed more materials and money. We decided that instead of starting our own project from scratch, that it would be best to complete the project that the community had already began. Over the next few days we organized and purchased the materials that were needed to complete the project. We contracted all the labor to be done by the local people which was a very positive impact on the community because of the poverty rate.

It turns out that I will be returning to Juarez/Huancabamba in 14 days to make sure that all the work is complete and then I will pay the contractor the money that he is owed. The project was a very big task and was far to much work for only me and Brad to complete, so we decided that this was the best option. The project includes the following; four toilets in an adobe two story house that is in need of water lines (to be run both from the source about 50 meters away, and also to the septic tank that was an astonishing 1/4 mile away from the bathrooms!), concrete floor, divisions between the toilets, a wood floor on the second story, a tank for water to be collected in before arriving in the toilets (this in necessary when there is not much water pressure), water lines for the actual bathroom with valves and such, tanks for the toilets, doors and window for the bathroom, all material for the septic tank which was very large (about 15ft x 15ft).

So if all goes as planned, then the bathrooms will be completed in only two weeks and 400 children who have never had a place to go to the bathroom will have something in their life that is taken for granted by so many people... Make sure to check out pictures at the link to the right (My Pictures). Blessings to all...