Parishioners and friends of St. Thomas’ Church traveled to Honduras to install a water system in a rural village. They were assisted in Honduras by a non-governmental organization, Agua Para Pueblo. (Photo courtesy of Peter Burns).

A rural village in Honduras will have running water thanks to parishioners and friends of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Whitemarsh.  Rob MacNamara, Rob McKinney, Peter Burns, Ryan Carroll, Jay Kernas and MacNamara’s 15-yearold son Timothy worked with Agua Para Pueblo, a non-governmental organization based in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, to engender a project that help villagers install gravity fed, potable water system to La Union San Juan in the Central American country’s Copan region. This is the seventh year that MacNamara has led a group from St. Thomas’ to Honduras to build a water system.

Thirteen thousand dollars of the $22,000 raised for the project was donated by St. Thomas’ from funds raised at the Gala held last fall for outreach projects, the Second Saturday sales held each month between May and October and from the Outreach Commission budget. The remainder of the funding came from friends of the team members.

“What makes this project different from others is that this system brings service to each house. In the project, three-quarter inch tubing and casing is installed to a point 10 feet from a house. The water is piped down to a 10,000 gallon tank where it is treated before it goes further down the mountain  to the dwellings,” said MacNamara, who works for Aqua Pennsylvania  and who became involved in water system installation through the Sisters of Mercy.

The material used for the project was carried up steep slopes of a mountain on men’s backs and mules, MacNamara said.  Although the St. Thomas’ team assisted with the work, much of the labor is being done by villagers using picks and shovels. The goal of this project is to bring water to 66 houses, according to MacNamara, who said that the villagers will complete it over the next year.

MacNamara credits Agua Para Pueblo with making the project work, because it has developed  a successful system. The St. Thomas' parishioners paid for their own travel and lodging expenses and hired an interpreter at the same cost as Agua Para Pueblo.

Although much of the American visitors’ time was spent working on the water system, they spent time  with local children.  Twenty-three year old Ryan Carroll, a  parishioner currently living in Tegucigalpa, traveled to the Copan region and had an opportunity to substitute teach in a local school, while the other team members helped children create hand-print  t- shirts similar to those created for Honduran children by St. Thomas’ church school children under the leadership of Brenda McVey, who coordinates children’s ministry.

Children danced for their visitors after the T-shirts were finished. In this picture, the T-shirts are hanging from a line above their heads.

The  St. Thomas’ parishioners took three Project Cure Kits containing $3,000 worth of medical supplies with them to Honduras and shipped several more kits to the Central American country. Additional kits for the African country of Malawi have been purchased with funds raised at the church auction.

Villagers celebrated the installation of the water system at a ribbon cutting while the St. Thomas’ team was there. “In the past, an elderly woman smashed a pottery jug to symbolize the fact that she would no longer have to carry water to her home, “ MacNamara said. 

“ It was an incredibly humbling experience,” MacNamara said.