The world water crisis often focuses on clean water for people to drink. It’s a huge problem, for sure, and the reason Water For People came to existence. But safe water is necessary for so many other important activities—such as washing hands and flushing toilets. Without enough water to go around, something’s got to give.
At Demetrio Canelas Colegio in peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia, over 750 students, ranging from kindergardeners to highschoolers, share four toilets for girls and four toilets for boys. The school has improved sanitation—a sector definition for technologies that, at least in theory, are private and separate poop from human contact. But whether there is enough water to go around to flush those toilets and keep the poop off little hands is another story.
Las Maicas, the community in which Demetrio Canelas is located, is not connected to any municipal water supply. The local government provides the equivalent of one tanker truck of water per week, free of charge, to the school. The underground storage tank at the school, however, is too small to store all of the water. The school constantly suffers from water shortages. And “improved sanitation,” more often than not, looks not so improved.
The headmaster of Demetrio Canelas is a tireless advocate for the environment. Frustrated by the deterioration he sees each year, he launched a tree-planting campaign and tied professors’ performances to including environmental education and activities in their curricula. He was also interested in building ecological-sanitation toilets to replace the chronically dirty water-based ones and sought out Water For People’s peri-urban team. After several meetings with the Parent-Teacher Association, it became clear that people were not interested in ecological, or dry, composting toilets. Choice and community interest and approval are fundamental to sustainability, so staff and partners came up with an alternative solution. 
A 10,000 liter storage tank was built. The larger tank size means that the school won’t waste the remaining water that their current storage tank can hold. Moreover, the new tank is also connected to a filtered rainwater harvesting system, meaning that for several months out of the year, supply will be abundant. During construction, the smallest kindergardners were measured, and steps of various heights were placed around the tank to make sure height doesn’t keep kids from washing their hands. Over 30,000 Bolivian children die each year from diarrheal illnesses, but handwashing is a key barrier to keeping poop, and the microbes in it, from entering their systems. Last year, when hygiene was emphasized during the swine flu scare, childhood d
iarrheal illnesses dropped by about 15% in Bolivia. Washing hands works, but there’s got to be clean water around to do it.
The water tank reflects Bolivia’s growing commitment to recycling as well. It is not reinforced concrete, nor ferro-cement, but rather uses PET bottles filled with soil as bricks. Each child brought two bottles to school as part of a recycling campaign, and skilled masons are transforming Coke bottles once providing soda to essential foundations that now provide safe water for drinking, washing hands, and flushing toilets.