Fort Collins – Gabriel Miller was able to manage only one trip up the hill from the community well to the village with a 50-pound water jug – called a cántaro – balanced on his head.
“But it was up a steep hill,” insisted Miller, a senior civil engineering student at Colorado State University.
For the residents of El Chile and La Laguneta, two villages in El Salvador, lugging the cántaros back and forth to the community water wells is part of everyday life.
It’s a routine Miller and a group of Colorado State University students hope they can ease by improving the efficiency of the rudimentary water-supply systems in the villages.
The students – members of the university’s Engineers Without Borders chapter – began working with the two communities last year, after responding to a request for help from Molly Sugrue, a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador.
Sugrue, who placed a request with the national Engineers Without Borders organization, told how the two villages face water shortages during El Salvador’s dry season, which runs from October to April.
“Families have no choice but to wear filthy clothes, go long stretches of time without bathing and generally take shortcuts to make the water last,” Sugrue said.
Nine CSU students, accompanied by their faculty adviser and a research scientist, first visited the villages in March.
In August, the students returned with two professional engineers.
While the first trip was a fact-finding mission, during the second the group came up with a plan to drill more wells for the villages.
To do that, the CSU students will have to raise money. They say they have contacted groups such as the Red Cross and the Rotary Club.
Jon Cullor, a graduate student who has acted as project manager, said he was surprised by how dependent on foreign aid the villagers have become after civil war in El Salvador, which ended in 1992.
“It took us awhile to convince them that we were not just going to give them this water system,” Cullor said. “They were going to have to work for it.”
Sugrue said the villagers will not disappoint the students.
“With the attention the Engineers Without Borders is giving the community, they work even harder and bring a lot more energy to their jobs,” she said. “They really want and need an improved water system, and they have begun to think this really could happen and, as a result, have doubled their efforts to see it happen.”
Staff writer Kim McGuire can be reached at 303-820-1240 or kmcguire@denverpost.com.
