FBT - Santa Cruz de Yojoa

I have now moved to Santa Cruz de Yojoa which is near Lake Yojoa in Honduras. I have been here since Sunday. Sta Cruz is larger and more active than Sta Lucia. I am excited that we are finally entering our hands ono techincal training. Today we are going to La Quesera to look take the flow of a fuente that they want to use as a water source. Water here is scarce, more so in the South. The south is very dry from Decemeber to May and due to the fact that most of South has been deforested, watersheds have become non-existent. Many people that live in the campo have little education about why it is important to protect their water source. Many communties think that if they have a water system they will have water whenever they want. Many of the fuentes here are polluted or have insucifient flow.

I have learned so much in the past month about Honduran water supply and politics. There 3 types of land here. Forrestal land (aboue 1800 m) which no one but the national government owns (but of course there are some exceptions here with some logging companies that supposedly had had land titles in these areas before the change in the government law. Domino municipal which means the municipal government owns the land, and the people can rent the use of the land but are unable to own it. Domino pleno is land that the municipal governments own in the beginning and people are able to rent the land as they are purchasing it. This is important because any water source is owned by the public. So even if a water source is on domino pleno the public owns 250 meters of land around the water source and 150 meters of land from each side of the shore of a stream or river....as you can imagine this does not happen. The problem communities run into is that a water source lies on someone´s land and the owner doesn´t want to give up the use of his water source and thus causes problems for the communtiy.