“As long as you have the ability to walk and to breathe, there is a way to move forward.”

Even before the Volunteer Coordinator translated the sentence into English, I could feel the resolve behind it.

Ernestina’s words echoed through my mind as the scent of bubbling oil from a woman cooking guinea pig hung in the air. Tiny Urubamba storefronts either overflowing with blue and red mop buckets, brooms, and sacks of laundry detergent or piled high with browning bananas and bright oranges filled the narrow streets around us.

As we turned left, away from the market area, Ernestina tucked a strand of slippery black hair behind her ear, straightened her ProWorld t-shirt, and motioned for us to follow. While waiting for a chance to speak with the School Principal, we sought relief from the Andean sun under the school’s shaded overhang and watched a sea of children racing across the grassy pitch in front of us.

A few minutes later, a middle aged man in slacks and a golf shirt greeted us in Spanish. I could feel his wariness as he ushered us into his office, but Ernestina quickly explained that we had come from the local ProWorld Peru office to talk about a water filter donation initiative. In July, ProWorld will send a team of volunteers to distribute water filters to a number of schools and the only thing ProWorld Peru will ask for in return is to be granted access to the school for follow up visits, to see if the students and teachers are using and maintaining the filters correctly.

The Principal instantly softened and as I mentally sprinted to translate the conversation (and caught about every 6th word), I could easily see that Ernestina had won him over with her unique blend of heart, tenacity, and unassuming perseverance. This school, (I later learned when Elanna, the Coordinator filled in the many words I missed) is brimming with kids from the rural villages who have limited funds to attend school and often not enough money to buy food, let alone safe drinking water. Instead, on their long walks back and forth to school, they settle for drinking from dirty streams or the rusty taps attached to sagging plastic basins (potentially saturated with unhealthy bacteria and parasites). Clean drinking water is a pervasive problem across Peru and the central goal of ProWorld’s Kantu Ceramic Water Filter Project is to eliminate bacteria and parasites from contaminated water and make it safe for human consumption.

This tiny, unassuming woman is the Director of the Kantu Ceramic Water Filter Project and she willingly shared her story with us as we walked from school to school gathering the names and contact numbers of Principals who want to participate in the initiative.

This Peruvian mother of 5 comes from one of the small villages, nestled high in the hills surrounding Urubamba. In August of 2010, Ernestina heard an ad on the radio that ProWorld Peru needed two new employees to join the team. She shifted everything in her schedule to be at the open call for people and found 30 other people with the same intention. Although someone else got the job, Ernestina didn’t give up. Along with four or five other women that she met at the Open Call, they decided to start a Woman’s Artesenal Group (much like the one included in this link) in Urubamba and every Monday for 3 months, Ernestina went to the ProWorld Peru office until she was able to secure funding and the necessary paperwork to get the group up and running.

Each time ProWorld Peru brought in a professor to help educate the women on a new knitting technique or a different style of weaving, Ernestina would master the skill (seemingly overnight) and offer to teach the other women so they could use the money allotted for the professor to instead buy more materials for the group.

Because of her frequent meetings at the ProWorld Peru office, Ernestina came to understand the various projects and initiatives and quite literally jumped at an opportunity to help out on the Filters Project for a week. 18 months later, she is now running the project and with shining eyes, she told me how receiving her own filter changed her life.

Shortly after Ernestina began working on the project, the Director (at the time) asked her to help put a list together of 10 families in her community who would benefit from the filters and then organize the training sessions for them. (To ensure the sustainability of the initiative, each family receiving a filter must attend 3 training sessions as well as create a stable platform in their home to receive the filter).

At the first training, the Director looked around and asked Ernestina why her husband hadn’t arrived yet. Ernestina explained that she hadn’t put her own family on the list, as she felt other families might need the filter more. The Director insisted that her family get a filter and now Ernistina’s own story is a powerful one for educating people about the importance of safe drinking water.

Since they started using their water filter, Ernistina’s kids have had far fewer visits to the doctor, the family has saved money on medication for parasites, as well as money for fuel because she no longer has to boil their drinking water, and her kids have lost weight because they are drinking less soda. As her awareness grew about the importance of clean drinking water (“Every year, diarrheal diseases caused by unsafe water are responsible for roughly 1.8 million deaths around the world. Most of these are young children under the age of five.” – ProWorld), she has become one of the most passionate advocates for the filter program. Ernestina even took on the challenge of educating the teachers and parents at her childrens’ school about why they needed to pool their money together and buy a filter for the school. As awareness continues to grow about the importance of safe drinking water, the health of entire communities is improving.

I will never forget Ernestina and the time I spent with her on the Water Filters project in Urubamba. Her passion for her job, her family, and her community will carry me through tough moments when I wonder how to move forward. I hope her story and her words inspire you the way they inspired me:

“As long as you have the ability to walk and to breathe, there is a way to move forward.”

If you want to get involved and support ProWorld’s projects globally, please take a minute to check out the ProWorld Foundation website to see how you can help.