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Announcing our Spring Match Campaign and a Special 5-Part Educational Series!

The past several years have proven that when our community comes together, we are capable of achieving truly great things with those most at risk in our region. I am constantly inspired by our community of committed donors, dedicated staff, community partners, grassroots organizations, research collaborators, volunteers, and so many more, who continue to come together to meet challenges and deliver when needed. Our water crisis is unforgiving, and the need for clean water access continues to be a major growing health and environmental emergency, affecting hundreds of thousands of people in our region, including the San Miguel Allende Municipality, as well as tens of millions more throughout Mexico. Only through the constant support of people like you, have we been able to reach deeper, and continue to directly impact the lives of more people each year, even during the global pandemic and turbulent financial times. This is truly unique, and I cannot stress enough how important this vast collaboration has been in continuing to push against our water crisis and against the negative effects it has had on our neighbors and in our communities.

Life for many in our community is truly difficult. Many rural communities around San Miguel – including peripheral communities of the city itself – have almost no water access at all, making the simplest of daily tasks a burdensome challenge. And even when limited water access is available, it is often dangerously contaminated with arsenic and fluoride – the two most prevalent contaminants in our local water supplies. 

Starting today, and through the end of April, your donations and impact will be doubled, thanks to some of the most generous members of our larger community – Chip & Lucy Swab and Bob & Peggy Krist, who have stepped up to challenge the rest of our community by sponsoring our annual Spring Match Campaign. That means that for every dollar you give, our sponsors will automatically double it, up to $10,000 USD.

In the following section, and over the next several weeks, we’ll highlight our water crisis and our work through the lens of different communities and partners around our watershed. In this special 5–part series, we will take you through: 

  1. The Cause of our water crisis, 

  2. The Impacts it has had on water quantity and quality,

  3. The Consequences these issues have had on people and communities, 

  4. Our Response over the last 10 years in collaboration with those most affected, and

  5. The Future of our work, and of water in our region and beyond. 

Today, we are illustrating the Cause of our water crisis through the perspective of one of our oldest partner communities, Pozo Ademado – a community an hour and half north of San Miguel surrounded by lush agroindustrial fields and yet lacking adequate access to water for the people actually living there. But before reading on, please consider making a donation today by clicking on the button below. Together we make twice the difference.

Saludos,

Dylan Terrell 
Executive Director
 

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Pozo Ademado
A Sea of Green Surrounding a Community in Perpetual Water Scarcity
Part 1
The Cause

“Day zero” refers to the day when a city, or region, has essentially run out of water. This has already happened in places like Cape Town, South Africa and even in cities of Mexico, like Monterrey, as recently as last year – a metropolitan region of almost 6 million people. Day zero, however, has been a reality for thousands of people in rural communities, right here in our watershed for years. Such is the case of Pozo Ademado, a rural community an hour and half north of San Miguel de Allende. This community only gets water once a week, on Mondays to be exact, when they must collect and store enough water to last the entire week. Even worse, the water they do receive is extremely contaminated, exceeding the Mexican norms for fluoride by nearly 4 times, and thus not safe for human consumption. 

At Caminos we first came to this community thanks to Carmen Castro, community leader, water activist, and co-founder of SECOPA (Community Services of Pozo Ademado) a health and holistic center located at the heart of Pozo Ademado and one of our longest and earliest grassroots community partners. Carmen has been working tirelessly to protect the health of her neighbors, and even neighboring communities, for decades. Over the past decade, water has become more and more critical as the agricultural industry continues to expand and water becomes more scarce,  and more contaminated. The health effects are too apparent to ignore.

Photo: Carmen Castro Mata, leader of SECOPA, a long-time collaborator of Caminos de Agua at a recent inauguration event for newly built Rainwater Harvesting Systems.

On the drive to arrive at Pozo Ademado, one is ironically surrounded by green. Industrial agricultural fields encircle you on all sides, with modern irrigation systems as you continue to drive between greenhouses that stretch on for miles. The neighboring arid region, where Pozo Ademado sits, with its incredibly limited water access, seems almost foreign being placed in the middle of these fields. But what is actually foreign is the expansion of these agroindustrial interests that otherwise have no connection to these communities nor to the water or land they unapologetically overexploit. For context, each year, our aquifer falls at an absolutely alarming rate of 2-3 meters (~6-10 feet), some of the most over-extracted groundwater in the world, with more than 85% going to agricultural production while communities like Pozo Ademado continue to dry up. 

Photos: (top) inauguration of a newly installed Rainwater Harvesting System near Pozo Ademado; (middle) multiple scaled models of Rainwater Harvesting Systems made by some of the beneficiaries to celebrate the inauguration of their systems; (bottom) a group of beneficiaries explaining to their fellow community members and others from neighboring communities how the Rainwater Harvesting Systems work.  

Only through the work of people like Carmen, Caminos de Agua, and our joint allies, have we been able to create enough awareness for people to start looking for solutions, creating partnerships that go from the local volunteer work of people like Gudelia Sánchez, who have gone from beneficiaries to water advocates, educators, and organizers of their own community and beyond. These partnerships have allowed for us to leverage donors, huge foundations like Gonzalo Río Arronte, corporations such as Rotoplas, and Municipal Governments like San Diego de la Unión, to coalesce in the fight against water scarcity and water contamination – thus expanding the meaning of community by understanding that we share one common water resource: the Upper Rio Laja Watershed and its aquifer system. 

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our Series next week, where we delve into the Impacts of our water crisis. 

You Can Make Twice the Impact this Spring 

While the need is daily, as is our work, during the next weeks your contribution will get doubled – allowing you to make Twice the Impact. So, join Chip & Lucy Swab and Bob & Peggy Krist in this season’s Match Campaign; together we can create much more critically needed access to clean water. Also, please consider sharing this message with your neighbors, close relatives and friends, or anyone interested in our water issues, so we can reach our goal. 

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to respond directly to this message, or contact us at info@caminosdeagua.org, where one of our staff members will be in touch with you soon. Thank you for your interest and commitment to our mission. 

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Romeo Robles