World Water Day: Change the direction for women in Tuburus
March 22, 2024
Every step that a woman or girl takes walking for water is a step away from education and recreation and self-actualization. Today is World Water Day, and we are asking for your help to change the direction for women and girls in the community of Tuburus in the Bosawás biosphere reserve in northeastern Nicaragua.
One year ago, we shared our goal of improving access to safe sustainable water in the Bosawás. Since then, with the support of the Change for Children community, the solar water system in Pamkawas has been repaired and today features solar panels proudly powering a new pump from which safe water flows first to the rehabilitated community water tank and then, through a distribution network of pipes, to tap stands serving 230 homes and families, a health post, a church, and the local school. Thank you for supporting this step in the right direction in Pamkawas!
Upriver in San Andres, your support has, since the new year, restored safe drinking water for its riverside residents on the banks of the Coco River. The water system suffered damage during back-to-back hurricanes in 2020. With renewed availability of water through the restoration of pipes linking a healthy water source with the village of 2,000 people, women and girls here can now follow a new path.
Most recently, further downstream, supplies arrived on the banks of Walakitang, the largest community in the area and home to over 4,000 people. The community, who had been without a water system for more than twenty years, was all hands on deck to contribute to the very dirty process of securing clean water for the community. And as recently as last month, a coat of blue paint on the community’s rehabilitated water tank signaled the completion of the first phase of the project – bringing water from the source to the tank and to centralized community water taps.
Access to safe water as a human right is a dream for many Indigenous communities. A dream realized recently in Pamkawas, San Andres, and Walakitang. Women and girls no longer walking for water can instead take steps in new directions. Water system and water treatment infrastructure brings with it enormous health benefits, time, and opportunity to these remote 
communities.
On this World Water Day, we are humbly asking for your help to take the next step, to extend safe water and all the benefits it brings to the neighbouring community of Tuburus – a community that has never had a water system, whose local source slows to a trickle during the dry season, and whose residents suffer the consequences of contaminated river water. Access to safe water will change the direction for women and girls and mothers like Marik in Tuburus. And we are asking for your help to take the first step!
You can change the direction for women and girls this World Water Day.
Bosawas Central America and the Caribbean In The Field Indigenous Peoples Nicaragua Water