Sharon in Honduras Part II

I can’t believe this is only my first weekend here in San Pedro Sula. I feel pretty comfortable here in my neighbourhood. People are starting to get used to my face around here and my surroundings feel less strange and hostile than they did in the first couple days. A couple of blocks from my house there is a ‘bulevar deportivo’, or a sports boulevard where from 5-7am and 5-7pm it is safe for people to come and jog around the string of blocks that act as a 1km running track for the 4 designated hours . In the middle is a grassy boulevard with permanent outdoor exercise machines and billboard signs saying, ‘no nos roben en la bulevar deportivo’ (direct translation: ‘we’re not robbed on the sports boulevard’). Otherwise, it is relatively unsafe to walk around the streets of San Pedro... People mostly drive around town. Talk about building walkable cities!?! Decreasing our dependency on the automobile in the North is one thing, but quite another here in San Pedro Sula. Here it is more an issue of crime and safety than environmental sustainability and traffic congestion.

Besides working with Marisa and also her co-worker Myrna on a Master Plan for the municipality and changing some land-use zoning to facilitate the development of an aquifer in the northwestern part of the city, I also met with NGO, International Samaritan, who is working with the low-income, garbage dump community, El Ocotillo. This week, Andrew of International Samaritan introduced me to the community and took me into the garbage dump which is the source of employment and subsistence of many of the residents in Ocotillo. I met an 18 year-old boy working in the dump who tells me that he has been working there since he was 10. Helping to improve the quality of life here really is the main premise of my internship here in San Pedro. Over and over, I am told that the main priority for Ocotillo is water. There is no reliable source of sanitized, potable water or a sewage system in the community. Some exciting news is that I will be assisting Marisa in a big meeting with The World Bank this upcoming Wednesday to discuss funds for the city. As well as presenting Marisa’s vision for a sustainable urban development plan of “San Pedro Sula Ever Green”, I am going to take this opportunity to propose investment in Ocotillo’s water system. It’s quite convenient that Ocotillo also fits in the municipalities plan to develop the city’s tourism industry AND that the World Bank has a specific Honduras program to modernize the country’s water and water sanitation systems. At this point I am very optimistic that by the end of the summer, funds will be secured to bring water into Ocotillo.

However, I am also learning that a lot of the main stumbling blocks to providing efficient water service delivery is a lack of community engagement. I’ve found that the observations of an IDRC report on water provision in Honduras are absolutely correct. The report speaks of a history of mistrust in low-income communities and private water service provider, Aguas de San Pedro (ASP) because of insufficient community engagement and the unlikelihood of full collaboration with the members of low-income communities like Ocotillo. This was affirmed by my meeting with Jesus Antonio Santos, a community leader in Ocotillo, who told me that Ocotillo wants water, but they don’t want ASP to be the provider. This makes the local community water boards, ‘Juntas Adminstradoras de Agua’, very important in Ocotillo’s case. Thus, before my meeting with World Bank next week, I must sit down with the President of the JAA in Ocotillo, whom I was introduced to yesterday.

Moreover, the article reports on the difficulties of the Concession Monitoring Unit to oversee private sector participation like ASP due in part to the lack of community engagement and education of how water service is delivered and the importance of meter reading. This is also affirmed to me by Marisa, the Director of the CMU, who expresses her frustrations to me on Friday morning.

Although I remain optimistic that by the end of the summer, a lot of headway will have been made to bring water into Ocotillo, there will be some institutional challenges to tackle.

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Part of trip: Sharon in Honduras

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