Engineers Without Borders – Vista Alegre Rainwater Catchment Project
By Christine Strong | March 11, 2025
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Our local Sonoma County Engineers Without Borders chapter has been providing services in this sector for over 10 years, and our volunteers are very passionate about bringing clean drinking water to villagers in Peru to improve public health and wellbeing. Through evaluation of need, our chapter forms partnerships with villages in Peru that are good candidates for water systems before embarking on the design, review, and implementation process for rainwater catchment projects.
These projects will collect rainwater during the wet season, accumulating, treating, and storing it for future use to support communities through droughts. The villages we serve are in the Amazon rainforest which sees cyclical seasons of very heavy rain followed by long and merciless drought. During the dry season villagers are left without clean drinking water. They resort to drinking unclean water, leading to widespread illness due to contaminants in the water including bacteria and parasites.
In November of 2024, we completed the implementation of a second rainwater catchment system in the village of Vista Alegre, a community along the Ucayali River (a primary tributary of the Amazon River) that has been struggling with frequent illness due to the consumption of unclean water. This project had a very successful execution, due in large part to the many months of design preparation, our wonderful team of volunteers who traveled to Peru to assist in construction, and the eager villagers of Vista Alegre who couldn’t wait to break ground and start collecting clean drinking water.
The video below shows a time lapse of some of the key components of the construction process of the Vista Alegre Phase 2 rainwater catchment system and gives a good sense of the work that our team completed during the 3-week period. While construction of this system was ongoing, our team also visited some systems that we had previously installed to monitor their upkeep and assist with any fixes needed to maintain functionality. We also visited some new villages that have requested water treatment systems to evaluate feasibility and begin to build partnerships for potential future projects. This project implementation was a collaborative effort that couldn’t have been so successful without the Vista Alegre villagers, our EWB Sonoma volunteers, our EWB national support team, our partners at Amazon Promise, as well as the support from our local community in Sonoma County and beyond who pitched in to help fund the project materials and implementation.
Our local chapter is responsible for acquiring funding to support the construction of the systems we design and install, as well as some assistance with system maintenance. Funding typically comes from the support of local businesses, individual donors, and grants. Funding often is the bottleneck that limits our ability to implement more projects and expand the amount of support we can provide. Communities in Peru are always reaching out requesting assistance with clean drinking water and we would love to continue to respond to their calls in ways that meaningfully support the elevation of public health. If you would like to donate to support the work that our Sonoma County Engineers Without Borders chapter is doing in Peru, please visit the link below.
https://support.ewb-usa.org/give/83741/#!/donation/checkout
If you want to learn more about our Sonoma County Engineers Without Borders Chapter or how you can get involved, please visit our website and Facebook page, linked below: