Sarawee Thirsts for Water

The community of Sarawee is a small village on the fringes of Dangriga with just over three hundred residents.  With the dry season now underway, the shortage of potable water for the past eight months continues to be a major problem, as it is forcing many to dig wells on their properties to access water suitable for drinking and cooking.  Those man-made springs, however, are quite dangerous as unsupervised children are at risk of drowning in them.  The cost of a new water system to be installed in Sarawee is undetermined, but according to Derrington Ramirez, the village council does not have the money to afford such undertaking and government has been slow in addressing the crisis.

Derrington Ramirez

Derrington Ramirez, Chairman, Sarawee Village

“A lot of people started digging wells, you know, going back to the old-fashioned way and we are very concerned about these wells because we have a lot of kids, and not only the kids that are living in the yards where the wells are dug, but kids come over and play with the other kids.  So we are very concerned about all these wells are being dug right now in the community, you know.  I’m not a plumber and I have no funds to do the system that the plumbers are talking about, that we need a whole new system.  That’s what they are telling me as the chairman here, that we need a whole water system.  Now I can’t tell you what that means, you know, exactly.  But what I can tell you is that there is no water in any pipe around here.”

Isani Cayetano

“Have you reached out to government, any branch of government that deals with these kinds of projects?”

Derrington Ramirez

“We haven’t reached out to anyone, they reached out to us.  They came to us because I had posted on Facebook our crisis.  They came in to us.  They had some trucks doing some work around here, at the reservoir and other than that it came to a halt and I haven’t heard anything since, and that’s almost eight months now.”