The sister islands association brings good water to the towns of Ometepe.

BALGUE, NICARAGUA – Josue Monge turns the spigot, cups his hands and draws long and deep from the rushing water.

He’s been stuck in class all day, memorizing his multiplication tables in sweltering midday heat. He drinks without pause for nearly a minute, letting the cool water spray up into his face and run down his arms.

Finally, he comes up for air gasping, smiling and wiping his wet fingers through his hair.

Refreshed, Monge spins around and bolts back to class, likely never paying a thought to the pristine, volcanic lake that feeds his fountain, nor to the sickness and disease that, only a few years before, likely would have ripped through his insides after a long drink like this.

“We used to have to send so many kids home from school who were sick and weak,” said Martin Otero, who serves as one of Balgue’s water committee members and as the village’s elementary school principal.

“And I lost count of all the infant deaths caused by the parasites, bacteria and pollution in our water.”

After nearly 20 years of assisting the island of Ometepe with a range of health and education projects, the Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association’s greatest achievement is likely the lake-fed water system piped to about a dozen communities and thousands of families.

The project, initiated in 1991, was in response to chronic sickness among the island’s residents who depended largely on Lake Nicaragua for water.

When it rained, human sewage mixed with farm fertilizers and pesticides to form a regular noxious injection into the lake.

And through it all, the residents of Ometepe fished from it, cooked with it, shared it with livestock, washed their clothes in it, bathed in it and drank it.

Diarrhea, flu-like sicknesses and itchy skin rashes were the most common ailments in adults, but children, especially newborns, were particularly susceptible to more serious problems.

“We had many infant deaths because of diarrhea, respiratory problems, parasites and bacterial infections from our water,” said Penny Diaz, the nurse who runs the Balgue clinic. “So much changed after the water system.”

More than 40 percent of children suffered serious illness in the early 1990s due to unsafe water in Balgue, according to Diaz. Now, only 5 percent of the population displays symptoms attributable to contaminated water, she said.

“I remember the days of stretchers laid out in these towns, ready and waiting for cholera outbreaks,” said sister islands association founder Kim Esterberg. “In BOSIA’s early days, we looked a lot at education and health care, where there were desperate needs. We sent down doctors to help, who would hike into these villages.

“But the problems kept coming back. They said they were just applying Band-Aids to the the real problem – and the real problem was water.”

In the early 1990s, BOSIA had formed a nonprofit coffee import relationship with Finca Magdalena, an Ometepe cooperative farm. A strong market on Bainbridge Island for the organic, fair-trade coffee established a steady flow of cash toward projects in Ometepe.

Esterberg and Scott Renfro, an engineer who spent part of his youth in Nicaragua, went down to Ometepe in 1991 to scout out the possibility of using some of the money to build a clean water system.

They singled out the island village of San Pedro, which had a disproportionately high rate of sickness.

“We called a meeting with the town and explained that we had begun selling coffee and that we could use that money to pay for tubing, cement and some professional help,” Esterberg said. “We’d do all that if the community agreed to donate all the labor.”

Many San Pedro residents agreed it was a good deal, but doubted they’d have the spare time to undertake such a project.

“They live very much on the edge and the prospect of donating thousands of hours of their time was something to ponder,” Esterberg said.

The meeting went on for hours and seemed destined for indecision. So Esterberg called a vote.

“And everyone raised their hands,” he said. “They all agreed to help because a lot of them had seen their own kids die for lack of clean water.”

A $17,000 infusion from coffee sales and more than 1,000 hours of labor from San Pedro families built a gravity system that piped water from Volcan Maderas’ crater lake to about 65 households. Renfro helped design the system with simplicity in mind, enabling the community to do repairs rather than depend on outside help.

News of the clean water system spread fast, and other villages were clamoring for a link even before construction in San Pedro was finished.

“While we were building, San Pedro’s neighbor, Tichanas, came over to check things out,” Esterberg said. “They asked who was next. We hadn’t thought of that yet, so we said, ‘You are.’”

Tichanas’ residents pitched in and, within a year, another village was abandoning their buckets at the lakeside for volcanic spring water flowing directly to their homes.

A flood of water system projects followed — one nearly every year — with BOSIA adding dollars to the sweat from about a dozen Ometepe communities.

Otero said his town’s water system is not only the source of improved health, it’s also a point of pride for the many residents who built it.

“We built this, and we continue to make it better every day,” he said. “When it was damaged last week, we had people come down from the mountain to help who were not even affected. We organize, we work together to support each other. It makes me think that anything is possible in Nicaragua because I know that when I ring that bell, everyone will be here, ready to help.”

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The series

This marks the final installment in Review staff writer Tristan Baurick’s three-week series on Bainbridge’s sister island of Ometepe, Nicaragua. Stories

from the series are archived at

www.bainbridgereview.com.