Small pools of spring water litter the mountainside in the Llano Largo region, often tapped by local farmers using hoses to carry irrigation water to fields.
LLANO LARGO, HONDURAS — The warmth of the cookstove fire belies the blustery wind outside, whipping through the pines and occasionally lifting the corrugated steel roof under which we sit uneasily. I am with my volunteer interpreter/research assistant/daughter, sitting at a small wooden table in the kitchen. We are in Llano Largo, the highest point in Central America and also the client community of my course in international water-system design, Honduras Water Project.
An Illinois team consults on a water project in Llano Largo, Honduras.
Our presence here is unlikely – less than a month ago, we canceled our planned trip here with the students in the course because civil protests and rioting followed a hinky re-election process for the nation’s president. But a window of calm opened just after the new year, and with barely 24 hours’ notice, the two of us scrambled to travel to this rural indigenous community to gather enough physical data for the students to begin system design.
The fontaneros (plumbers) of the Llano Largo water system show visitors the location of existing underground piping along one of the village roads.
Our Lenca hosts couldn’t be more kind. Navi, a water board member, has elected to cook for us while we stay in the community, and her hands are busy slapping the dough to form the best-tasting corn tortillas imaginable. She overloads our lunch plates with fried plantains, frijoles indios, eggs, queso (of no particular variety – it’s simply cheese here, making the former Wisconsinite in me wince), avocados, and tortilla after tortilla after tortilla.
A typical home in Llano Largo features unscreened windows, outdoor plumbing, colorful flowers and at least one house dog to drive off unwelcome visitors.
A masonry tank in neighboring El Tablon features a vault housing chlorination equipment for the community’s potable water supply. Partner Agua y Desarrollo Comunitario provides ongoing support to communities to ensure their drinking water is disinfected and safe for consumption.
Our reconnaissance trip will last only five days, including two days of travel to and from the community on rutted roads and steep, winding curves. That leaves just three days to lope up and down the steep mountains gathering flow data, pipe routes, source availability, and – most importantly – all the attitudes and expectations our client community bears toward this proposed water system.
Instructor Ann-Perry Witmer (with green bandana) reviews hydraulic considerations with a team of students. Witmer takes a class to Honduras each year to work with a rural community to improve their access to safe drinking water.
This last detail is the most important. It’s a premise of my research – and of my course teaching – that it’s not enough to understand the technical constraints of an engineering project. Engineering is about addressing human needs, and so we must understand the people with whom we’re working, from their particular beliefs about the value of water to their community’s political structure to their interactions with neighboring communities. By learning the unique characteristics of the community, we’ll design a better infrastructure solution that meets its needs, not only now but in the future after we’ve gone.
Students on the Honduras Water Project team measure the area of a catchment for an intermittent spring in 2017. Because the region experiences distinct rainy and dry seasons, many springs flow robustly in summer and dry up in winter, making them unreliable as community water sources.
For now, that means enduring temperatures around the freezing mark in homes that are not heated, shivering around the cookstove fire and eating the freshest possible food. It’s a propitious glimpse into the lives of a Lenca community.
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