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MARIA'S STORY
“The water followed me here,” Maria Garcia says. “Not to drown me, but to bring more good things to me and my children.” Maria used to teach elementary school in the Waslalan community of Santa Rosa Dudu, where WfW installed a gravity-fed water system in 2007. Her current teaching assignment is in Las Nubes, a community where WfW began working in early 2009.
Waslalan schoolteachers rotate to different communities once every three years. Maria says this is so that teachers can continue to learn in new communities with different challenges. It also ensures that students don’t lose respect for teachers they have had for a long time. Due to her rotation, Maria has seen the health and educational benefits that result from clean water not once, but twice.
“In Santa Rosa, my students would walk five minutes to the stream to get water,” she says. The stream she speaks of in Santa Rosa is liquid mud, the color of milky coffee. “Now, they can just go out next to the school and fill up their glass or bottle with clean water from the tank.”
Before clean water was available, Maria says the students used to get sick frequently and miss school a few days a week or drop out entirely. Now, they are able to attend class more regularly, and since they no longer have to make long trips to collect water, they spend more time in the classroom every day.
Maria uses the water as an educational tool as well. With a new microscope in her school, she has her students compare slides of untreated water with the water from the storage tank outside, so that they can see the microbes in the old water they were drinking. When the students understand this, she says, it is easier for them to remember to wash their hands with clean water when they return from the latrine or to clean their bowls at the tapstand before eating lunch.
In the village where Maria grew up, there were fifty children and no schoolteacher. Mindful of the need for good teachers in communities like hers, she went to the town center of Waslala to study teaching for four years before she was certified. Now, she teaches over 100 students in the Las Nubes elementary school. Maria says she and most other teachers do their work not for the low salary they are paid but because they love the children they teach.
Maria also has two children of her own, who she says follow her everywhere. They benefit from the water system as well, since they live close to the school and they can drink from the same tapstand. After Maria returns from the schoolhouse in the evenings and they have dinner, they are able to easily collect water from the school. Before, they were unable to collect water at night because the source was too far away.
Thinking of her children, Maria talks of the hope she has for the future. One of the most important things she will do in her life, she says, is to leave something better for the next generation after she’s gone. Maria defines her hope as the refusal to be satisfied and make do with the little she is given. She, like others in her community, supported the new water system because she is focused on the future.
Perhaps the water will follow Maria to the next community to which she is assigned to teach.
