Electricity in Nicaragua – The Power of the Sun

The article below was featured in the May/June 2009 edition of Common Place Magazine and highlights some of the work done by Asofenix in Nicaragua. The article was written by Emily Will  and photographed by Melissa Engle.

For her 17 years of married life, Marbellyz Ortíz Espinoza has dreaded one part of each day — rising between 4 and 5 every morning. It’s not just the wind that howls and gusts indoors through the gaps between her home’s sheet-metal roof and adobe walls or leaving the comfort of bed to start another rigorous day as a farmer’s wife in the isolated mountains of central Nicaragua.

Marbellyz Ortíz Espinoza

It’s the darkness. Espinoza finds it spooky and has nothing to ward it off but a flickering wick sticking out the opening of a soup-size can of kerosene. The candil, as it’s called, spews as much thick smoke as it does light, and the 35-year-old mother knows its fumes are not healthy. The “lamp” is also hazardous, quick to erupt in flames when kerosene leaks around the wick. So, when a switch was flipped and three solar-powered compact fluorescent bulbs illuminated the home as dusk settled one January evening, smiles brightened the faces of Espinoza, her husband Pánfilo Enrique Guzmán and their sons, ages 15 and 5. The house, filled with the family, MCC workers and partners and several young community technicians trained to install the solar systems, reverberated with expressions of joy, awe and congratulations. The gift of solar power is coming to rural Nicaraguan villages, such as Espinoza’s community of Corozo, with the help of a young MCC partner organization called Asociación Fenix, Asofenix for short. MCC workers Sarah and Seth Hays, of Lakewood, Colo., work alongside communities in solar projects and on other renewable energy projects, such as biodigestors, microhydroturbines and wind turbines.

Pánfilo Enrique Guzmán, right, works on wiring a flourescent fixture that will provide reliable light to his home

Entire communities, notes Seth Hays, are entering an age of electricity without relying on the fossil fuels that most Canadian and U.S. residents take for granted. “Environmentally friendly energy sources will allow rural Nicaraguans to develop and improve their livelihood for many years to come in a manner that will not be threatened by international markets and trends,” Hays says. “Nicaragua has great potential for supplying a large percent of its energy needs through renewable energy.” Asofenix founder and director Jaime Muñoz, reared in an impoverished family in rural Nicaragua, views the development of renewable energy sources as an initial move to help isolated communities deal with the challenges of surviving on near-barren land. A large project such as installing solar panels is often Asofenix’s first step. “We are committed to working alongside a community for 10 years. The large projects are what bring us into the community, but that is just the start of our work,” Hays says, describing how Asofenix forms committees to encourage residents to work together to make their communities stronger. “Our dream is that they, in the future, will find the problems in the community and work on ways to solve them for themselves,” Hays says. The challenges are great. Like many other Central American and Caribbean countries, Nicaragua’s forests and mineral resources have been nearly picked clean. Its land and water have been depleted and polluted to produce exports such as cotton, coffee and beef. Foreign enterprises and the country’s elite continue to profit while many residents struggle to simply get by. Rural areas often lack infrastructure and basic services. The families in the communities in which Asofenix works combine various survival tactics.

During the rainy season, those with access to land cultivate basic food crops, such as corn and beans.

Marvin Velasquez, left, and Milyer Enrique Guzmán fit together the electronic parts while Kenneth Jose Ortíz Guzmán, left, and Jeninsa Dayana watch

Then some or all family members may migrate to Costa Rica to pick coffee during the three-month harvest. Others move to Managua for either short- or long-term employment in maquilas — foreign-owned assembly plants. Nicaragua now ranks as the Western Hemisphere’s second poorest nation. And, as in Haiti, the hemisphere’s most impoverished, deforestation is creating conditions in which erosion, nutrient runoff and the drying of water sources combine into a downward spiral of failing crops, barren land and worsening poverty. Asofenix director Muñoz, though, chooses to hone in on what rural Nicaragua does have — plentiful sunshine that can be tapped for renewable energy and the people themselves, driven by a fierce desire to improve their lives and to do whatever it takes to get their children out of poverty. Asofenix focuses on solar power for three major uses — to pump water to families’ homes, to pump water for drip irrigation to small plots of land and to provide limited electricity to homes. The capacity to light a few fluorescent bulbs can give families their first opportunity to bring activities, such as sewing and homework, into the evening hours, as well as the opportunity to run items such as a radio or television. José Felix Salazar, 56, who lives in the community of Bramadero, about an hour’s walk from Corozo, shares his delight that solar-powered drip irrigation is allowing him, for the first time, to grow a crop during dry months when community of Candelaria, one of Asofenix’s first. Impressed, Salazar went to see Muñoz about the possibility of a similar project in Bramadero. He was soon helping to organize his community’s 45 families to install solar panels to pump water from a well to faucets at individual homes, some as much as a kilometer away. Each family agreed to contribute 10 days of labor, to plant trees to protect the water source and to improve sanitation by constructing home latrines. That was in 2007. Since then, the piped water has eased families’ bare-boned budgets and never-ending toil. “Before, we went to fetch water every morning after breakfast, and we had to carry it home on our heads,” says Salazar’s wife, Flor de María Gonzales. She and her 12-year-old daughter, Anielka, hauled the water over a rocky road a 15-minute walk away. Occasionally when they weren’t able to fetch water, they had to buy it. Now they merely step out their back door and open a tap — a service that is costing them a mere 10 Nicaraguan cents per pail, 60 times less than they paid to buy a pail of water before. They and the community’s other 44 families deposit their water payments into a common fund for the system’s upkeep and maintenance. In this region, Seth Hays says, about 30 percent of heads of household migrate to Costa Rica during its his land would normally sit idle.

José Felix Salazar

His small plot — about 0.8 of an acre of emerging tomato and watermelon plants — offers rows of green among the brown fields that mark this land in dry season. And it’s drawing attention. “Many have come to see it, and they all say the plot is beautiful,” he says. Salazar was instrumental in bringing solar power to this area. A few years ago, a man who came to buy a pig from him mentioned a solar water project going up in the coffee harvest, and in some communities, almost 80 percent of the men go. About 5 percent of the area’s residents live and work there throughout the year. Solar power and drip irrigation may provide an alternative. “Our hope is that it will give people a source of income so that they don’t have to migrate to Costa Rica,” Hays says. Salazar’s dream is that solar-powered pumps will eventually allow him to irrigate enough of his land to bring home some family members. Salazar says his eldest son Fredy, 27, moved to Costa Rica to work in construction, work that is increasingly harder to find and paying less. Daughter Mary Luz, 24, wouldn’t mind giving up her job in a Managua maquila, which requires working as quickly as possible, doing the same task, such as sewing a collar on a shirt, over and over again for 10 or more hours a day.

His oldest daughter and her husband, who live nearby, have already expressed interest in farming with Salazar. And he hopes to provide more opportunity for his 18-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter who still live at home. “This project is the best one to have come here, better than the road, electricity and the school,” Salazar says. Muñoz is glad people are dreaming of brighter futures but, with 26 years of grassroots experience in this region, he’s also aware of the perils in imported and high-tech solutions to the problems of impoverished rural areas. He’s designing Asofenix projects to be as grounded in the community as possible. In Corozo, for example, Asofenix has trained six people, including two teenage women, to install and maintain solar-powered generating systems. Guzmán, Espinoza’s husband, is part of the team, and the technicians’ first “real-life” test of their skills was wiring Guzmán and Espinoza’s home.

Salazar fits the lid back on a water tank. A solar-powered pump provides water for drip irrigation to his fields

The young workers glowed with satisfaction when the bulbs brightened the darkness that January evening. Guzmán, who was voted president of the project committee, says, “We’ve never before had a successful project here. We are a very, very poor community and, till now, we’ve been a very, very ignored community without hope. Now, people are happier.” Their house was the eighth of 24 local homes to be connected to a solar panel. Guzmán remained in Corozo this year, rather than migrating to Costa Rica, to give local leadership to the effort. But neither he nor Espinoza are complaining about forgoing the coffee harvest earnings.

A community member in Bálsamo, Nicaragua, watches the installation of a solar-powered drip irrigation system

They are being repaid by witnessing not only the power of the sun that now lights their home, but also by the personal and community power sparked in working together with neighbors. And while Espinoza may still have to rise with the roosters, she’s looking forward to doing it without fear of the dark — or a smoky, potentially explosive candil.

 

First Person: Jaime Muñoz

The article below was featured in the May/June 2009 edition of Common Place Magazine and profiles Jaime Muñoz, the founder of Asofenix. The article was written by Emily Will  and photographed by Melissa Engle.

Jaime Muñoz

From the first time I had heard about solar energy as a child, it intrigued me. When I was in school, I wanted a career that was different, out of the ordinary. Now, at 41 years old, I’m able to spend my days seeing families in rural villages like the one where I grew up meet some of their most basic needs through solar power. As the director of Asofenix, I see firsthand how solar energy can be made available to even the poorest of families and families that live in mountainous areas very far from cities. MCC helps support our efforts to install solar power systems in isolated communities that never had access to electricity before. I love the hands-on work of developing and installing these systems. We also work in other areas of renewable energy such as microhydroturbines (that use the force of water to create energy), biodigesters (that produce cooking fuel from cow manure) and wind turbines (that use the force of wind to make energy).

Some communities call me ingeniero, the engineer. I’m always quick to explain that I’m not an engineer — in fact, my family didn’t have the money for me to continue my education beyond secondary school. My best “university” has been to work with people with a lot of experience in the field of renewable energy. It’s true that my educational level is low, but I’ve gained a lot of knowledge through people, through reading and through hands-on experimentation.

I was the oldest of six children. We lived in Esquipulas, a community of about 15,000 in the rural province of Matagalpa, in central Nicaragua. When I was 14, the Sandinistas imprisoned my father in Managua, the capital, and he remained there for four years. During these years, I traveled to Managua to try to get my father released. I knew nothing of the city and very little of the world, and I was on my own in a highly charged political environment. Finally, a political group helped me get him out. By then, I had gotten my first taste of community work through a literacy campaign when I was 15. I’ve been at it throughout the 26 years since, the one continual thread in the many ups and downs of my life.

I began teaching when I was still a student in secondary school, working with vocational classes in metal and woodworking. It may seem incredible that they would hire someone so young and inexperienced, but I was very motivated, and the directors noticed that I was gifted in mechanical, hands-on work. I spent three months in the shops learning how to handle the machines and equipment and reading the manuals and instructions. I’ve always been the type of person who wants to figure out how to do things, even if I’ve only read about doing them. When I was drafted into military service in 1984, my map-making ability kept me out of combat, for which I was grateful. Still, I was glad when I finished the year and a half of service and dismayed when the Sandinista government, just a few months after my release, ordered me to work with them in a civilian position or join the Army Reserves. So at 22 years old, I found myself the director of the Sandinista Youth in the town of San José de los Remates.

Over the next decade or so, I worked with a range of organizations, from international reforestation brigades to a first-time government program to provide national identification cards. What I liked in all my positions was working with people and forming relationships. In 1997, I lost my job due to federal budget cuts. I went to Managua and opened a pulpería, a little grocery shop. It was a huge change. I had never had my own business. But now I’m very appreciative that I was able to learn another way of living and working. I earned enough to support myself and to do some studies, so I looked into studying solar energy.

In the 1970s my father had taken an auto mechanics correspondence course from Hemphill Schools, which is based in California but offers courses taken by students throughout Central America. When I talked to the school’s representative in Managua, I was surprised and delighted to learn they had a course in photovoltaics, or solar-cell technology. I also attended solar power trainings and seminars offered by the engineering university in Managua, including a course taught by Dr. Richard Komp, a U.S. solar tech expert. I built a solar oven during that course and afterward I experimented with building other solar cookers, as well as water heaters, solar dryers and other equipment.

The university saw my interest and invited me to join Grupo Fenix, a new group working on solar power. I volunteered for three years with Grupo Fenix, even helping Dr. Komp teach workshops and courses. I came to realize that my passion lies not in research as much as in hands on work with solar projects in communities like the one in which I had grown up. Through Grupo Fenix, I got to know a foreign visitor, who offered to financially support such community-based work. In 2001, I began Asofenix.

It started small, but in 2007, I received a major 10-year grant from a Dutch humanitarian organization. Today, I live in a house in Managua, the capital, and my office is there, but I am devoted to being out in the rural communities where Asofenix is working. I travel outside the city several days each week to help install renewable energy systems, meet with communities and train young technicians. Seeing rural families meet some of their most basic needs through renewable sources of energy is rewarding. And I am happiest traveling out to villages, spending time with people, sleeping in a hammock at their homes. This work, which draws on my technical know-how and also allows me to relate to people, deeply fulfills me.

Fragil Survival in the Sacred Valley

The Sacred Valley is full of paradoxes. Stunning vertical landscapes. Tourism and a hippy mecca. Andean Waldorf schools. And grinding poverty…

I first meet up with Sandra and Sandy: two good natured, down-to-earth Canadians who are volunteering in Peru. Sandra with Kuasay Wasi Clinic (http://kausaywasi.org/) and Sandy with DESEA, Desarrollo en Accion (www.deseaperu.org), Green Empowerment’s new partner in implementing a project to improve health through household water filters. With the exciting news from the Metabolic Studios of Annenberg Foundation, the project finally has the resources to really get off the ground. I am in the Sacred Valley to see the team of DESEA, meet the communities and work out the logistics of the new grant.

Ricardinia, the newly-hired field manager, took us out to the communities: Totora, Accha Pampa and Chaipa. While at about 4000 meters (13,000 feet) themselves, they were nestled in valleys with the surrounding peaks towering at the aching heights of 5000 meters (16,400ft). Ricardinia grew up a day’s walk from the closest road, in some hidden village in these sacred hills. She left for high school and trained to be a teacher. She heard the radio ad for the DESEA field manager and was hired on. She is a huge asset as she is the main cultural and linguistic bridge to the poor communities.

In Totora we met Gregorio, the filter workshop manager, who was the young mayor of this adobe village. He was dressed in western clothes and spoke in fluent Spanish with a Quechua accent that made round words sound like triangles. He had attended the CAWST (www.cawst.org) training as is a devotee of the biosand filters that he builds everyday. We caught him with a bundle of wire mess as he was heading to Pampallacta to repair the school’s filter.

When they saw Sandra arrive in Totora, a group of women gathered for a “clinic” (not a building, but an event). They squatted on the ground and unwrapped their bundles of brightly woven cloth to reveal children that needed a nurse’s eye.

We met a woman and her baby that had lost a dangerous amount of weight from diarrhea. She had taken her to the Kuasay Wasi clinic where she was given a dehydration solution. By the time I met the baby, she had gained back some weight and looked like she would survive, but it drove home the point that simple hygiene and clean water are the most important things we can do to save children’s lives.

These communities speak almost no Spanish. They maintain the poetic Quechua language and traditions alive. Everyday clothes look like a celebration, with dozens of buttons on the wrists arranged like pearls on an evening gown, and big flat round hats covered with ornate red cloth that dangled over the edge.

And yet, illiteracy, isolation, discrimination and malnutrition have taken their toll. Sandra describes meeting a woman who could not remember how many of her children had died; was it 5 or 6? I hear stories of a toddler eating paint, excessive alcohol and spouse abuse. I don’t see this kind of malnutrition where I live in Cajamarca, where rural people have few resources, but plenty of food, although both areas show signs of protein deficiency, with a diet based on rice and potatoes.

In Totora and Accha Pampa, we walk into the tiny dark kitchens, covered in soot, to see the filters. Ricardinia translates from Quechua. The people we met said they used the filters daily and even said that they had noticed an improvement in health of the children. They understand that the filters clean. The filters are made in one of the project communities out of local materials. The concrete structure is filled with sand and gravel which effectively remove pathogens.

Ricardina, Gregorio and the team say that everyone wants a filter. But once they have it, there are some (perhaps 15%) who don’t use it. Do they want it just because it’s a new thing to have in their home? It’s modern and different? Daily habits run deep too, thousands of years deep. And introducing some new-fangled things into those daily patterns is a hard thing to do. Even when you know it’s good for you. I know I should floss every day, but I don’t. It seems that here, the filter use and health education is not a secondary complement of filter installation, but needs to be at the core of the program.

This pipe, from a dirty open sink hole, delivers water to schoolchildren

We surveyed the existing water sources. In Totora, there is “agua entubada” (piped, but not potable, water) that just comes from an open river, above which the animals graze… Kids drink from water that comes from an open sink hole near the school. Other communities have gravity-fed water systems that deliver spring water to some of the houses, but not to others.

Sandy has a kit to test for total coliforms and fecal coliforms, which are indicators of unsafe drinking water. The streams have lots of fecal coliforms, the sealed water spring water distribution systems are clean and the filtered water is clean. However, this has shown several of the systems are not working properly and need to be fixed (the sand was not fine enough and the water passes too quickly). This monitoring tool helps them adjust the filter fabrication.

The complex social and cultural environment will pose plenty of challenges, but also makes the need for the health and water program all the more evident. With the support of Metabolic Studios of Annenberg Foundation, 150 filters will be built and installed. Most importantly, workshops on health and hygiene will be integrated into the program and health promoters trained from the communities. Something so simple can save a life. After spending time with the DESEA team and going to the communities, I am optimistic that this partnership has what it takes.