The Water Boy

CHARLIE HUIZENGA '81

delivers safe water to Nicaragua.

When Huizenga co-founded Agua Para La Vida (APLV)-Water for Life—in 1987 bringing safe drinking wafer to rural Nicaraguan communities seemed to be a straightforward engineering proposition. However, he and the APLV volunteers had an additional hurdle—constructing water systems in the midst of a civil war. "There were a lot of challenges, primarily with the infrastructure," says Huizenga, who earned an engineering master's from the University of California-Berkeley and founded APLV (www.aplv.org) with his advisor, professor emeritus gille Corcos. "Transportation and getting materials to and from the site were real challenges. And getting access to cement was difficult. But it was especially challenging for the local people we were working with. There wasn't anyone who wasn't touched directly by the war, who hadn't lost a family member."

The group persevered, and during the last 20 years Huizenga has worked with Nicaraguan farmers and villagers to build water systems in 48 communities, providing water to more than 14,000 people in a country where half the population doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Constructing about three projects a year at a cost of roughly $12,000 each, APLV enlists 25 to 30 local families to help build the systems. "At the end of a project, when the water is flowing out of a faucet, they're so grateful and so proud, especially knowing what it means for their health and their quality of life," says Huizenga, a building energy efficiency researcher and adjunct architecture professor at Berkeley.

While APLV's Nicaraguan staff now handles most of the technical design and project management from the organization's regional center in Rio Blanco, Huizenga still travels to Nicaragua about once a year; he and wife Jeanne Panek spent two weeks there in April with their 3-year-old son Coby. Fundraising is now his primary concern: "We have a formula that's working and the pieces of it are there, but the biggest missing piece is how to keep the funding coming in."