Project Gettysburg Leon’s (PGL) sister city relationship with Nicaragua is built on cross-cultural exchange. This includes arts and education programs, nutrition programs and much more over the decades, including potable water projects in rural communities where people have no access to clean drinking water. Four years ago, PGL helped fund a water system for the rural community of Talolinga. The success there included the community providing all needed physical labor and their organizing a water board. This year PGL will initiate a similar project.
The rural community of Las Marias is roughly an hour’s drive from the city of Leon itself, within the department (or state) of Leon. There’s one bus that leaves in the morning and returns in the afternoon over rough dirt roads. There’s little way for any vehicle to get in and out during the height of the rainy season, since a part of the route is a riverbed that stays dry for much but not all of the year. Families in Las Marias by and large rely on agriculture to make a living, with some owning enough land to plant and sell their own produce such as corn and beans, but most people work as laborers on larger farms in the area. The school in Las Marias goes only to sixth grade and there’s no permanent health center, although the Nicaraguan government sends a traveling clinic to the community once or twice a week. Average income is less than $100 per month for each family.
PGL has initiated a project in Las Marias and the nearby community of Los Mangles teaching families to grow their own gardens and thereby improve nutrition. As part of this work, PGL learned that Las Marias hopes to improve its drinking water system by adding a pump and pipe system to a well that has gone unused for years. The water has been tested for quality and quantity and this project would be a major improvement to quality of life within the community. 284 families would be beneficiaries of this new water system. All intend to provide any labor needed for the project and there’s already a very efficient water board to maintain the existing system and sustain any improvements. For most of these families, this new water system would mean going from roughly a gallon per day of good drinking water per person to roughly three gallons per day, with any excess to be used for irrigation of gardens or other needs within Las Marias.
Project Gettysburg Leon is proud of supporting communities such as Las Marias, who only ask for a chance to use their own hands to make life better in impoverished circumstances, so that people are not forced to leave home looking for a better life in other places. We ask for support from the Gettysburg and Adams County communities, as we have before, to help the people of Las Marias but to also keep the flame of cross-cultural understanding burning bright between the countries of Nicaragua and the USA.
Gregory Bowles
Greg Bowles is the current director for Project Gettysburg Leon, the sister city program between Gettysburg and the country of Nicaragua that was founded in 1986.
