Partners come together to bring life-giving water
Lipscomb's Peugeot Center teams up with national company and Guatemalan NGO to bring water to hundreds of families in villages in Guatemala.
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Residents of Maricha, Guatemala, benefitting from the Peugeot Center engineering project to bring water directly to their homes, are featured in promotional video shared nationwide by partner Garney Construction.
A cord of three strands is not easily broken, and that is certainly the case with the trifecta team of national company Garney Construction, Guatemalan non-profit ADICAY and Lipscomb’s Peugeot Center for Engineering Service in Developing Communities.
The team came together in 2021 to design and install a water distribution system for Los Limones, a village in the mountains of Guatemala located an hour’s walking distance from a safe, consistent water source. The group continued its cooperation in 2022 to bring water to residents of Marichaj in Guatemala.
Then Garney, an employee-owned company that specializes in water and wastewater projects, used the Peugeot/ADICAY project as a springboard to educate people across the nation about the value of fresh drinking water and the need to invest in water infrastructure around the globe.
In July, the company sent a video crew to Guatemala to film the team of Lipscomb faculty and Garney employee-owners completing the water distribution project that benefitted three villages: Las Flores, San Pedro Marichaj and Santa Maria Marichaj. They created a video for the 2022 national Imagine a Day Without Water awareness campaign.
Imagine A Day Without Water Video
The new water distribution system served three communities whose residents were having to walk hours away daily to fetch water.
Imagine a Day Without Water is a national day of action coordinated by the U.S. Water Alliance, a national nonprofit organization that advances policies and programs to build a sustainable water future for all. The Alliance’s annual Value of Water Campaign provides its members nationwide with a toolkit to educate and inspire the public about how water is essential, invaluable and in need of investment.
At Garney, the team working on their 2022 Imagine campaign materials knew exactly where to go to show people who didn’t have to imagine a day without water; they are living it every day, said Natalie Dees, a Garney employee-owner who participated in the second Peugeot/Garney on-site trip to Marichaj.
“It was obviously a transformative experience,” Dees said of the trip, which inspired her to become a champion for the Garney/ADICAY/Peugeot partnerships. She will be leading a Garney/Lipscomb team to Guatemala this March.
clean Fresh water from a mountain stream is captured and run through piping to the community miles away.
Garney already had a strong corporate culture of giving (even CEO Mike Heitmann was on one of the mission teams in Guatemala), so it was no surprise that high-level Garney officials began promoting the Peugeot mission opportunities to its 2,000 employee-owners nationwide. The 20 spots in the two 2022 trips to Guatemala filled up, and the 20 spots on the two planned trips for 2023 are expected to fill up just as quickly, Dees said.
“It is special to send our employee-owners to see firsthand what our money is doing,” she said. The employee-owned company has been a significant donor to the projects in 2022 and again in 2023. “It is a really nice morale booster. It makes our mission and our work come full-circle,” Dees said.
ADICAY (Asociación Para El Desarrollo Integral Comun Ak’ Yuam), a non-governmental organization (NGO), based in Guatemala, serves a crucial function on the team as it provides in-country resources and coordination of the community members to do all the preparatory work, such as surveys of the area, implementing legal contracts and initial construction, said Steve Sherman, director of the Peugeot Center.
The 2022 project benefitted 126 families in Maricha, Guatemala. ADICAY/Peugeot projects ensure that the entire community is involved in building and maintaining the water system.
In fact, one of ADICAY’s main goals is to always involve the community itself in installing and maintaining the improved infrastructure projects, which extends the life of the system, he said.
In the Imagine video, Ana Cal Choc, executive director of ADICAY, said the organization puts a priority on projects that benefit children and women’s health. The Marichaj project completed in July benefitted 126 families, said Cal Choc.
Lipscomb students are currently working with ADICAY to design water distribution systems for three more communities—Esquipulas, Santa Maria and Las Mercedes—in Guatemala, said Sherman.
In the video, Cal Choc notes that her organization has the “knowledge, capacity and experience” to help many communities still in need, but doesn’t have the funds. “But we thank the organizations that finance the projects because that has helped us to work as a team,” she said in the video that went out to Garney employee-owners nationwide and was submitted to the national Imagine A Day Without Water campaign.
The water filtration/sedimentation tank set up to filter the water from it's source, about three miles from Maricha.
According to Dees, Garney has recently re-worked its purpose statement to become: Building sustainable futures with the world’s most precious resources—water and people. “Lipscomb’s work and partnership with ADICAY fall right in line with our mission statement,” said Dees. “That’s why people are excited about it.”
ADICAY and Peugeot, an initiative of the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering at Lipscomb, were brought together some years ago through Nashville engineer Kevin Colvett, of Inflo Design Group, a longtime Peugeot partner who has implemented many water infrastructure projects in Guatemala.
He was also in Guatemala in July and was featured in the video explaining the power of the partnership to impact lives: “When you have engineers, contractors, universities, local engineering firms and NGOs like ADICAY all working together for the same cause, beautiful things can happen,” he says. “I’m really honored to be a part of that.”
“It’s hard to explain, but if you have not had water for a long, long time,” said Sherman in the Imagine video. “Then being able to turn on the tap and get clean water is like getting Super Bowl tickets!”