Unless you’ve stayed up all night studying capital cities for a pub quiz, it’s safe to say you won’t have heard of Puerto Cabezas, the small, but bustling, urban centre of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua.
The city, better known as Bilwi in the local Miskito language, can be a tough place to live. Power outages are rampant and road access is patchy, schools are overcrowded and the costs of basic supplies can be exorbitant. For Bilwi’s youth, the traps of drugs and gang violence are all too easy to get caught up in.
Surrounded by rivers and lagoons and facing out on to an Atlantic sea-scape, good water, ironically, is hard to come by. Just 20% of Bilwi can tap into the limited municipal water supply, with public waterways and streams visibly polluted. Only half of the city’s population has access to toilets.
A CHANGE OF COURSE
It may not seem like gang violence and a lack of clean water are pieces of the same puzzle, but one innovative WaterAid programme has found a way to fit them together.
Set up in 2013, this imaginative project seeks out teens who have dropped out of school, face exceptional challenges at home, or are at risk of involvement with drugs and gangs, and offers them the chance to become skilled entrepreneurs.
The teenagers who take part are taught the masonry and plumbing skills needed to build wells and toilets, and work with a psychologist to help resolve social and emotional issues that may be holding them back in their lives.
The project also gives them the knowledge to establish their very own plumbing businesses, meaning that there can be a long-term change in both their lives and in their communities.
THE STORY OF RON
“Being in a gang in Bilwi means you’re a thief — that no-one likes you.”
Fighting with stones, machetes and sometimes firearms, Young S.G. — from the neighbourhood of Saint Gill — is a gang made up of boys as young as 12 years old. Ron, now 21, once counted himself among them.
“They used to steal,” he explains. “They used to assault people and fight with gangs in other neighbourhoods.” He recounts one particular fight between Young S.G. and the neighbouring Bus Stop Gang when a friend was cut with a machete (while Ron himself escaped with a blow to the head from a stone).
Gang violence isn’t the only issue affecting Ron’s neighbourhood. Here, dirty water is rife. Ron explains: “Mango trees grow around the well and their leaves fall down into the water. The water gets contaminated and the colour of the water changes. People get sick and in some cases we can die drinking it.”
When a recruiter from the plumbing training programme came to Ron’s house to propose he become part of the scheme, he saw a way out of gang life — as well as a way of bringing safe water to the community.
Ron is enjoying his new job. Sometimes he works under his own steam, other times with fellow apprentices like Lucy and Wesley that he met through the training course.
When we speak he is mid-way through digging his fourth well, 60 foot deep into the ground. Having thought about studying civil engineering, he finds the construction work stimulating— so much so that he’s now considering setting up his own personal plumbing business. It seems like the best investment right now: “There’s no future in gangs,” he says.