Upgrades bring freshwater to Indonesian village
Last month, one of our field reps in Indonesia trekked into northern Sulawesi to visit Teling, a hillside village of farmers and fishermen. He wanted to check on the village’s freshwater system we helped overhaul several years ago, and found that the infrastructure of PVC pipes and water tanks is still working, providing reliable running water to almost all 250 households in the village.
It wasn’t always so easy to get freshwater in Teling. A system built in the 1990s piped in water from a small river more than four miles away, but over the years the village exhausted its financial resources replacing sections of deteriorating pipe and couldn’t afford to install the additional water holding tanks they needed.
In 2005, we agreed to fund the necessary upgrades, and in exchange, Teling villagers created a 250-acre no-take forest reserve. Home of the endemic crested black macaques and the Sulawesi red-knobbed hornbills, the protected area connects with reserves created by neighboring villages Kumu and Poopoh. Together these reserves amount to one continuous 874-acre protected forest.