Educational Complex in Agua Dulce
(Link to Schools Construction Project Description)
Agua Dulce is a town of 37 families in the Palos Blancos municipality of the department of La Paz, Bolivia. Until 2004, the 180 children in the community had only an outdated, undersized primary school. To continue past sixth grade, students needed to walk to Puerto Carmen, 7 km away—far enough that most students simply dropped out of school. Further, the town was having difficulty recruiting teachers willing to live in such remote locations.
The residents of Agua Dulce, recognizing the importance of education for their children, identified improved educational facilities as the chief need for their community and petitioned ACDI/VOCA, through the Yungas Community Alternative Development Fund, financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, for funding and technical assistance to construct a new educational complex.
The facility that ACDI/VOCA designed and built, with the input of the community of Agua Dulce, includes new classrooms, a multipurpose athletic court, six comfortable apartments for teachers and a wastewater-treatment system appropriate for the impermeable soils of Agua Dulce.
The new school building consists of six well-lit classrooms and administrative offices, all built around a colonnaded walkway. Each classroom has space for 30 students, and is equipped with two blackboards to permit multi-grade teaching within one classroom. In the center of this L-shaped complex is a multipurpose athletic court with basketball hoops and goalposts for salon soccer. Together these facilities ensure that students develop academically and physically.
The six-teacher housing units meet another need. In poor, rural areas, communities have great difficulty attracting and keeping high-quality teachers. Even in communities that show the best hospitality and open their homes to teachers, many view such remote areas as “hardship posts,” with living standards well below those to which they are accustomed. The Agua Dulce teachers’ apartments have a kitchenette, a living/study room, bedroom and bathroom, all centered around a courtyard that the teachers have planted with flowers. These comfortable apartments make it easier for teachers to stay in the community and develop long-term relationships with their students.
With all of these newly constructed facilities, there was a need to develop safe and effective wastewater-treatment facilities. However, the soil in the region is not permeable enough for septic-seepage systems to function safely. Instead, ACDI/VOCA designed a series of constructed lagoons filled with plants that filter and process the sewage from the school buildings. This process cleans the water of organic material and eliminates biological contamination. The water that drains from this system reaches the river cleaner than the river itself.
The lagoons, with their flowering water hyacinth and their totora reeds reaching skyward, seem more like a water garden than an advanced wastewater-treatment system, but these plants perform important work.
Totora reeds in the first two tanks employ a symbiotic relationship with bacteria on the surface of their roots to convert organic material in the water into biomass. The leaves of a totora reed are honeycombed and hollow, providing a large surface area to absorb oxygen. The plant transports this oxygen to its roots where aerobic bacteria use it to process organic material from the water into biomass for the reeds. These reeds need to be pruned to 30 cm every few months to maintain the effective biomass absorption of the system. The cuttings can be used as feed for cattle and other ruminates or as compost.
Water hyacinth, a free-floating surface plant with a prolific ability to absorb nitrogen, salts and organic matter, fills the second two lagoons. Although it has been considered a pest in many areas for its aggressive colonization of water systems, it is gaining a reputation as an ideal plant for wastewater-treatment. It absorbs a wide range of salts and toxins, along with nitrogen and organic materials, leaving the water it lives in clear and clean. As with the totora reeds, the water hyacinth needs to be removed from the system periodically, which can be accomplished easily by lifting the free-floating plants out of the water. The hyacinth is ideal as a nitrogen-rich compost additive, serves as animal feed, and may have potential uses in artisan products.
Today in the town of Agua Dulce, children of all ages play sports on the athletic court, the halls of the school ring with the sounds of students learning and teachers live comfortably a short walk away. It’s an investment that the community maintains with pride demonstrated by new flowers planted around the freshly painted buildings. Just down the hill, frogs sing in the processing lagoons, and residents harvest valuable plant products from the same system that treats their wastewater.
