Club Esperanza: Major Septic and Water Issues…please help!

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Chachi

This will have to be a post with very minimal pictures, or maybe I will add some of our awesome students and teachers at the end. But we are having some incredibly bad problems with our septic system and our city water bill at the School! We need to resolve this soon, maybe you can help?!?

SEPTIC: We have a major problem that when the city sewage system on the road backs up, all of the sewage backfills into Club Esperanza because we are lower than then everyone else. Well that has been happening frequently this past month and it is unbearable. We arrived for school and our check valves on the sewage line that prevents back flow had malfunctioned and the “agua negra” back filled into all the bathrooms, spilling out into the classrooms and office. We had to cancel classes two days because the city takes that long to respond. It is incredibly unsanitary and honestly disgusting. But our teachers are incredible and go into action cleaning to keep things from being worse. Photos – First is our school flooded and the massive two day sanitization and clean up. The second is our sewage registry box that is overflowing, raising that metal lid and seeking a solution was definitely something where I felt like I was on that show “Dirty Jobs”, only worse because on TV you can’t smell anything! The third photo below is our teachers and staff working out in front of the club where the manhole was backed up…this is work the city should be doing, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do! Many of the parents of our students came to help as well…they are equally frustrated with the city!

SOLUTION: We need to install and independent septic tank and leech system so that we can be off of the city sewage lines. It will have to be a huge tank because we have 300 people a day and a full kitchen serving two meals a day.

COST: $2,500

WATER ISSUE: These photos below may look like normal toilets. But what if I told you that these were causing our water bill to spike to $500 a month! That is what has happened. The water company sent us a bill that was INSANE, so for the past two months we have been fighting with them. We thought we might have a major leak under the foundation that was not visible or that someone was stealing water from us. It turns out that our toilets are so old that the kits went bad and they were leaking two gallons a minute. It was hard to narrow it down because of the city water being high pressure at night and low during the day. Worse yet the internal kits for the toilets are no longer available in Nicaragua. We need to get this resolved as well.

SOLUTION: It is pretty simple. We need to buy new toilets to replace the old ones. It will be an entire overhaul to the toilets of all of our bathrooms.

COST: $1,150