This year's rainy season has finally arrived, a very important opportunity to mitigate our growing water crisis. For years, Caminos de Agua’s Rainwater Harvesting Program has been one of our most effective strategies to ensure access to clean drinking water for many of the more than 680,000 people throughout the Upper Río Laja Watershed, where San Miguel and more than 2,800 other communities reside. Last year, thanks to supporters like you, we were able to triple the amount of rainwater systems we built in 2020, and this year we are striving to double that again because the need is only growing. Over the next four months, the rains will fall, and those existing rainwater harvesting cisterns will fill, providing families with sufficient drinking water to last all year long. Rainwater is safe, inexpensive to harvest, and naturally free of extremely hard-to-remove arsenic and fluoride contamination, which plagues community water supplies across our region and are responsible for a host of chronic health conditions.
Drinking stored rainwater, treated with a simple filter that we produce right here in San Miguel, is an effective way of avoiding these threats!
During last year's rainy season, rainfall was abundant and it may have seemed like we had received “enough” to quench our needs. But the reality is that much of the rainwater simply went uncollected, and, therefore, largely unused for human consumption. Rainwater, a precious gift of nature, can make a huge impact on the health and well-being of so many, but only if we can capture, store, and ultimately treat it to remove biological pathogens. During our decade of experience, we have continuously improved our ability to partner closely with local communities at risk, helping them create rainwater solutions. At this point, our single biggest limitation is raising the money to continue to help more communities and families.
So all this month, we will be bringing you human stories to illustrate how our Rainwater Harvesting Program impacts the health and well-being of real people. We hope you will join us in taking advantage of this short window of opportunity to build as many systems as we can, to capture the rains that fall, and improve the lives of many. Support this program, and expand water access, by making a donation today.
|