A mother and child in Nicaragua irrigate crops with buckets of water.

When Rosa Coca gave his neighbors permission to connect a pipe to a spring on his land, which would provide clean drinking water for their homes, his grown children didn't like it. Coca's children wanted the water for themselves. But they were unable to dissuade their aging father. He wanted to share water with the other residents of San Antonio, a small village that clings to the steep mountains of western Honduras just before they drop into the Lempa River where it forms the border with El Salvador. San Antonio's 28 families had lived for years using water from the small streams that flow through their community. Yet increasing deforestation of the hillsides above, along with unchecked pesticide use by area farmers, had left surface water scarce and dirty. Diarrhea became a common illness in the village. Attempts to find alternatives got nowhere. Water as Critical Issue Differing Solutions A Crime To Deny Water Water Projects

Then, in January of 1999, the Christian Commission for Development (CCD)—a United Methodist-supported ecumenical organization in Honduras—signed a covenant with leaders of Mercedes, the municipality that includes San Antonio. The agreement established a partnership in which local leaders and CCD staff would work together to improve the quality of life for the sprawling municipality's 6000 residents. San Antonio was one of the first villages to benefit from the partnership, and in August 1999 the residents—with the exception of Rosa Coca's children—started digging trenches and installing plastic pipe. When that work was finished, they needed to construct a concrete water tank just above the village. Yet when 28 community members started digging the foundation for the tank on November 17, 1999, about a dozen of the Cocas showed up. The group was armed with handguns and machetes and threatened to kill the villagers if they continued digging. According to Gloria Minta, a local Catholic activist, what the Cocas didn't know was that villagers—worried about the possibility of violence—had alerted local police. "The Cocas fell into a trap," admitted Ana Rodriguez, the municipal judge in Mercedes. When they started threatening the workers, a contingent of police officers stepped out of the nearby woods and told them to go home. Instead of leaving, the Cocas started threatening the police. A scuffle ensued, during which five Cocas were arrested, while several others escaped. Charged with threatening police officers and disobeying a legal order, the Cocas spent six days in jail in nearby San Marcos before being bailed out. Their case is still pending in a court in Nueva Ocotepeque, the provincial capital.

Water as Critical Issue The fight over water in San Antonio is emblematic of a growing conflict in Central America and throughout the world. After decades in which the battle over land was the most dramatic struggle for the rural poor, in this new millennium the most critical issue will become water. Land without water will decrease in value and utility. In coming decades, the struggle for water will tear apart communities, exacerbate differences between social classes, and challenge governments and private organizations to change how they perceive their roles.

Building a local water system in Honduras.

In Cochabamba, Bolivia, last April, the army killed six people and injured more than 100 when it opened fire on demonstrators. They were opposing a 35 percent hike in water prices imposed by the new owners of the city's water system, a British transnational controlled by the Bechtel Corporation, a US-based construction giant. "Water is becoming a scarce commodity, so those with power and money are taking it over," said José Enrique Espinoza, CCD's program director. From the world's large cities to small villages, water—and who controls it—is becoming a source of conflict. According to the World Health Organization, 1.7 billion people in the world have no access to safe drinking water. Half the world's 6 billion people lack a sanitary way to dispose of human waste. As a result, water-borne diseases account for 90 percent of all infectious diseases in the developing world. The numbers are only going to get worse. The World Resources Institute predicted in October that by 2025, at least 3.5 billion people will experience water shortages. "We're using way more water than the earth can afford to give us," says Jonathan Nash, the organization's president. There is no more fresh water on earth than there was 2000 years ago, when the population was 3 percent of its current size. During just the past century, when the world's population tripled, water use increased sixfold. The demand for fresh water has been steadily rising in response to industrial development, massive urbanization, and increased reliance on irrigated agriculture. The world is overpumping groundwater by at least 160 billion cubic meters a year, threatening future food production and basic living standards. At the same time, human activities are sending massive quantities of pollutants into aquifers, irreversibly damaging the fresh-water supplies that provide drinking water to almost a third of the planet's people.

The water crisis is exacerbated by the steady disappearance of forest land. Trees play an essential role in holding water and slowly releasing it into the ground, where it is filtered before entering the aquifer. Yet trees are being cut down at an alarming rate. Between 1960 and 1995, the amount of forest cover per person in the world fell by 50 percent. In Central America, the relentless expansion of the agricultural frontier, especially by cattle raisers, has steadily reduced forest cover. And the replacement of old-growth forests by coffee plantations—which have much less capacity to absorb and hold water—has further exacerbated the deterioration of regional aquifers. Central America has not escaped the worldwide water crisis. Of the 40 million people in the region, 15 million have no access to potable water. More than two-thirds of the region's rivers are heavily contaminated by agricultural chemicals, coffee-processing waste, improper human sanitation, and untreated sewage from the region's cities. Runoff from unregulated mining operations is also a dangerous pollutant.

A child in Ethiopia collects water from a spring.

In El Salvador and some other areas of Central America, the water table is dropping by a meter a year. Development experts warn of impending "water stress" in San Salvador, especially if environmentalists lose their battle to preserve the El Espino natural reserve from developers. Its aquifer holds one-sixth of El Salvador's renewable water supply. In Managua, Nicaragua, as many as 200,000 people have informally connected their homes to the city's water system with homemade plumbing. Forty percent of the fresh water piped into Guatemala City is lost from leaky pipes. Deforestation has radically reduced the amount of water flowing into the Panama Canal, putting at risk the waterway's ability to function. In southern Honduras, overuse of water has led to the growing salinization of well water in many communities, while agrochemical contamination worries health experts. And in Costa Rica, high nitrate contamination from pesticide use in the Virilla watershed is a leading suspect in San José's abnormally high rate of stomach cancer. Differing Solutions The international community has taken a two-track approach to resolving the growing water crisis. International financial organizations such as the World Bank have generally treated water as an economic commodity and have pushed privatization schemes, like that in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Those reforms have come under increasing fire of late. At a June gathering in Brussels of leaders from seven of the world's poorest countries—the so-called P7—the World Bank's water policies were described as "an organized theft of water from the poor" by Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist and honorary president of the P7. "The moment you let the market determine the situation," Shiva said, "the swimming pools of the rich will get a higher priority than the drinking water of the poor."

Popular groups and organizations related to the United Nations have generally taken a rights-based approach, as embodied in the conclusions of the 1992 UN Earth Summit, which declared that "all peoples have the right to access to drinking water in quantities and of quality equal to their basic needs." Critics of this approach warn that too much water has been given away at less than its real cost, providing no incentives for conservation and leaving public water systems chronically underfunded.

Residents in Venezuela line up for water after floods knocked out their water system.

Central America is a battleground for the two concepts. With coaching from the Inter-American Development Bank, officials of San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second-largest city, signed a contract in October handing their water and sewage system over to the Italian firm ACEA, which manages Rome's waterworks. Yet "most municipal systems in the region are such basket cases that no one would want to take over any of them," said Tony Brand, coordinator of the UN-sponsored Central America Water and Sanitation Network. Hurricane Mitch caused 48 of the 50 largest towns in Honduras to lose at least part of their water and sanitation systems. And almost half the country's 4066 rural-piped water systems were knocked out by Mitch. With the central headquarters of the Honduran government's water agency flooded and with the capital's water system crippled, the agency was unable for weeks to respond to requests from the hinterlands. Rural municipalities were left on their own to resolve their water problems. Following Mitch, Brand said, there exists a new sense of municipal responsibility for providing water, with the backup of the state when resources are available. Another lesson of Mitch, the vulnerability of watersheds, may be harder to learn. A water shortage or contamination in one jurisdiction is often caused by what is happening somewhere else. So water experts like Brand argue for less concern over political boundaries and greater attention to watershed management. This is a complicated project in a region like Central America, where 23 major watersheds belong to two or more countries. According to Carlos Granados, a geographer at the University of Costa Rica, if there continues to be a lack of international coordination in watershed management, Central America's future will consist of increasingly severe droughts during the dry season and more dangerous floods during the rainy season.

During the past century, the world's population tripled but water use increased sixfold.

Norma Elisa Mejía, a CCD program officer, notes that this message needs to be grasped on a local level. "One of the lessons of Mitch is that it doesn't matter if my plot is reforested and well taken care of if all around me the micro-watershed is naked and unprotected," she said. "Our task is no longer just to help peasants care for their own land but rather to look beyond their borders at the whole environment."

Such a comprehensive approach to village-level change is markedly different from the classic "latrine and water" approach that characterized many development organizations in the past. Such an exclusive focus on infrastructure contributed to water systems that failed from lack of community involvement in maintenance. Also, some latrines were never used because the decision to install them had been made by urban managers rather than community members. Although development experts hold few expectations of government bureaucracies, they are more hopeful about grassroots organizations in the countryside. "Peasant movements in this country have historically demanded land, yet they're slowly coming to see that land without water is land without life," said Mejía. "There are lots of peasant groups that have struggled for and won land. But if they don't have water, their economic situation can't improve. They can't move beyond subsistence agriculture. So it's time that they started demanding both land and water. The two have got to be linked."

A Crime To Deny Water Carlos Mauricio Villeda used to be a schoolteacher. He remembers telling his students that, one day, they would have to pay for clean water to drink. "They laughed at me," Villeda said. "But now it's come true." Villeda is today the provincial governor of Ocotepeque, and the rising cost of water has forced him to spend a lot of his energy mediating local water fights. "We've been taught to have such high respect in Honduras for private property that it's impossible at times to convince someone that other people may need that water more than they do," Villeda said. "As a result, many children don't have clean water. That's something I'll never accept. It's a crime to deny someone access to water."

Fresh water in the Mercedes community of Honduras is made possible through a partnership between local leaders and the Christian Commission for Development (CCD), an ecumenical agency and partner of UMCOR.

The Honduran constitution grants landowners rights over their land but reserves ultimate ownership of surface water to the state. If a landowner denies a community access to a spring, residents can always go to court and seek a judicial order granting them water rights. Yet the process is lengthy, costly, and—given the high level of corruption in Honduras' court system—unlikely to yield favorable results for ordinary people who lack political power. If denying water is a crime, it may be a sin as well. Leopoldo Serrano, the Catholic priest whose parish includes San Antonio, said he intervened personally with the Coca family, yet to no avail. "They weren't interested in being part of the community, in working with their neighbors," Serrano said. "Their concept of responsibility was very individualistic. Ironically, after the Cocas were arrested, they asked the priest to intervene on their behalf. Serrano refused. When CCD began working with Mercedes residents in 1999, it helped women in the municipality's 15 villages form small cluster groups. Their first activity was to conduct a survey of household conditions. According to Delmi Lopez, a women's leader in the principal village of Mercedes, the survey identified potable water as the most urgent need. Romelio Hernandez, the mayor of Mercedes, believes the water crisis is only going to get worse. "In 20 years, some of our villages are going to run out of water, and there's nowhere else to get it from," the mayor said. "We need to start massive reforestation projects soon, but my appeals to the government forest service fall on deaf ears. The bureaucrats simply can't find their way out this far." Yet residents of Mercedes' villages aren't waiting for the government to come and solve their problems. In San Antonio—where, despite opposition from the Cocas, the new water project was dedicated in May—Gloria Minta said the community is determined to protect the water that has come to change their lives. "Before, we suffered for days without water," she said. "That experience helped us appreciate what we have now. Water is life. Without water, we're nothing. So now we're going to plant trees and do a better job of caring for the watershed. We had to work hard to get good water in our homes, and we're willing to work hard to keep it."

Other Water Projects of The United Methodist Church The following projects of the Advance for Christ and His Church assist communities that are working to secure clean water. Advance # 240208-0 Construction of Potable Water Supply System This project of the West Visayas District of The United Methodist Church of the Philippines seeks to assist families in San Jose in their plan to construct a potable water supply for their community. The source of water, a natural spring, needs protection. The project encourages water conservation, recycling for gardening and farming, and education. Advance # 120762-7 Sanitation and Health Recent research concluded that rampant disease and frequent deaths in the area of Kakumdo, Ghana, were the result of poor sanitation and the lack of clean water. The Organization of Concerned Christian Men of Cape Coast, Ghana, have undertaken a project to drill boreholes and create a water station to provide people with potable water. The project trains the youth of the community to repair and maintain the facilities. Advance # 418900-1 Water Development Clean, potable water is an ever-present need in Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola. This project of the Committee on Development of the Methodist Church of Haiti is sponsored by the Kansas East Annual Conference. The communities on the island of La Gonave and the circuits of Petit Goave, Les Cayes, Cap Haitien, Jeremie, Port-au-Prince, and Carrefour are targets for this work, which seeks to provide potable water through well drilling, source capping, and cistern construction. The Committee on Development has made water development a high priority and will seek to address water needs across the country. Advance # 150802-2 Water for Life Years of civil war have affected many aspects of life in Liberia. The nation's major water treatment plant has been destroyed. This project targets 20 Liberian communities where there are no wells, hand pumps, or water systems for pumping clean water. UMCOR will construct 20 wells with the help of 200 community-based volunteers.

Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Honduras. The Christian Commission for Development (CCD) is UMCOR advance #519075-6: Integrated Development

Reviving Methodist Church Hospitals in Africa and Asia Text and photographs copyright 2001 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. Visit New World Outlook Online at http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/. For reprint permission, contact New World Outlook by E-mail at nwo@gbgm-umc.org.