Photo Credit: Forest Woodward
Women in rural Nicaragua typically wash their family's clothes on rocks in streams - they bathe there, too. All streams are contaminated by animal and human use, including dumping of untreated sewage into rivers, washing trucks and tractors in rural streams, agricultural pesticide runoff, and enormous quantities of soap and dirt. Sometimes women wash near a village well, creating large pools of standing water where mosquitos will then breed.
Impact
- Improve living standards in Nicaragua through lower incidences of sanitation related diseases and mortalities.
- Provide basic human dignity.
- Reduce environmental contamination caused by poor sanitation (gray waters).
Community wash stations are clean, concrete floored, roofed facilities where women can wash clothes without having to carry water or clothes long distances. These wash stations, built next to the village well or spring, consist of a group of concrete washboards and a central water trough. They also include 2 or 3 shower stalls where people can take a bucket of water and bathe in privacy - a true luxury for rural people. These facilities encourage people to bathe and wash clothes more often, reducing incidence of skin infections. The wash stations also have the intangible benefit of being a place where women come together to talk, a rarity in a society where they don't leave home often.
Wash stations have sanitary drainage of gray water to prevent puddles and filter the water before it is returned to the soil.
