Sustainable living, part of Misión Para Cristo, works with communities to provide clean drinking water, improved sanitation, digging water wells, and planting gardens for food to the people in the Jinotega region of Nicaragua. Once contact is made with a community, Sustainable Living works with community leaders to identify the basic needs of families focusing on water, latrines, gardens and cement floors for improved sanitation. The community members and families are trained in how to construct, install, and maintain their own facilities. Depending on the project, families will contribute financially as well, in order to promote ownership and dignity instead of dependence. By improving sanitation, providing drinking water with filters and wells, Misión Para Cristo is helping take care of the whole person and family.

• Statistics show that having safe drinking water decreases cases of diarrhea by 45%.1
• Worldwide, 2,000 children under the age of 5 die every day with 1,800 of those deaths linked to water borne illnesses.
• “Contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause 502,000 diarrheal deaths each year.”3
• Nicaragua is the only country in Central America to have less than 90% of the population using water from an unimproved source.2 Families with an improved source still may have contamination as the water is often piped to the home from a river, lake, or open well.
• Globally, at least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with feces.3
• 1 gram of feces contains up to 1,000,000,000,000 microbes. - CDC
• Follow us on facebook: @sustainablelivingmpc

   

References:

• 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. WASH statistics. Accessed on July 10, 2017. Available here.
• 2. World Health Organization. Nicaragua. Accessed on July 10, 2017. Available here.
• 3. World Health Organization. Fact Sheet. Accessed on August 4, 2017. Available here.