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How it all got started
In January of 2006, two freshman MIT students: Froylan Sifuentes and Kendra Johnson began searching for a community empowerment project they could work on for the summer of 2006. With the help of an Ecuadorian organization called Ecuador Volunteer and a local anthropologist named Corinne Duhalde, Froylan and Kendra found out about Santa Ana, a small community in the Ecuadorian Amazon with concerns about their potable water system. They were funded and supported by the Fellowships Program at MIT's Public Service Center.
Froylan and Kendra spent 10 weeks in Santa Ana during the summer of 2006, during which time they worked with the community to build a concrete dam to replace a crumbling, makeshift dam that the contractor had left. The timeline on the national funding had run out, and there were no plans to train the community water board or operator, so they also worked to set up a simplified administrative system and train the relevant members of the community. At the end of the 10 weeks water still wasn’t flowing in Santa Ana because some key components that the contractor was responsible for were still missing.
The project continues
In January of 2007, Froylan and Kendra went back to Santa Ana for 4 weeks, bringing newly illustrated and improved versions of the technical and administrative manuals they had made on their first trip. These manuals are provided download here on this website and you may use them for your own purposes – we only as that you credit the source. <link to pdf of technical and administrative manuals>.
On their first day back in the community they were able to use an indoor toilet and wash their hands at a sink with running water! However, this success of the water system was short lived and the focus of the trip quickly shifted from a capacitating program for other communities to fixing the immediate technical problems with the water system in Santa Ana. These included initiating the chlorination system, sanding and painting the elevated water tower with anti-corrosive paint, fixing up the shoddy plumbing in the bathrooms, and hunting out and repairing leaks in the distribution system. At the end of the 3 weeks, the community had intermittent water supply because serious technical issues still remained.
Sacha Yaku
The organization Sacha Yaku was born in the fall of 2007 as a mechanism for long-term assistance to the families of Santa Ana and to the water system. By linking the water system to the opportunity to earn money by selling their traditional ceramics and jewelry we hope to galvanize a community push to make both of these projects succeed.
A second project: Reforestation in Tecpaco, Central Mexico
Froylan’s work in Mexico insipired him to continue his work on water a bit closer to home. He is originally from the town of Huejutla in the state of Hidalgo in central Mexico. In recent years his region has been suffering more and more from water shortages. Of the four rivers that used to pass near Huejutla, three of them have now dried up completely. The fourth, which provides water for the entire town, is starting to dry up as well. There are many causes of these dramatic changes, but one of the major ones is that deforestation is changing the regional climate--causing more flash-flooding, more erosion, less rain, and unstable river flows. In the summer of 2007 Froylan began a project to build a tree nursery and empower the community of Tecpaco to begin to reforest their communal lands. This reforestation project aims to offer a potential solution to this regional problem and to bring the local benefits of fruit, sustainable timber, and protection for their water sources in the community of Tecpaco.
For more on this project, see “About Tecpaco” and “The Reforestation Project".
