Agua Sagrada

Education is important to the people of the Sacred Valley, high in the Andes mountains of Peru. But only the larger towns can support secondary schools, so most children don't ever go to high school. Villages in this valley often consist of clusters of houses scattered across several different elevations for farming purposes. One of these villages, called Viacha, started a satellite cluster they call Tuscan several years ago just a few miles from the secondary school in a neighboring town, for the express purpose of allowing more of their young people to attend high school.  

But without a clean water supply, Tuscan can only support a few families, and only a few children get to go to school. 

That's where you come in. The Galileo Foundation, which has long been involved with the communities of the Sacred Valley, will travel to Viacha this fall to help finance and install a system that will bring water to the lower village from a spring 1/2 mile up the mountain. Having sanction from the local government, the members of the Viacha community will work together to make sure the project is a success. 

But the people of the Sacred Valley don't expect a free handout. In addition to building their own water piping system, they are also planning on supplying labor and materials bring water to a nearby orphanage as a way of giving back, for in their tradition, giving is receiving. 

Water is life anywhere you go.  By allowing this new community to have a water system and the opportunity to educate their children to the high school level, this will eventually come back to all the families who comprise the two villages of Viacha and Tucsan.

The Galileo Foundation has worked on other projects with Leonidas Gavancho and his extended family, which is huge, to implement school projects in the area and also assist in building projects at the orphanage of Sunflower.  Richard Paul Evans wrote a book entitled Sunflower and his brother Van Evans is one of the founders of the Sunflower orphanage in Huayllabamba, Peru along with Leonidas Gavancho and his father, Guillermo Gavancho.

The success of the project will be tracked by counting the number of families that relocate to the lower village and the number of children from the village attending high school.

Obviously clean water will impact the health of the community which means happier and more productive community members.  It is actually quite a rare thing to see a new community started in this part of the Andes.  The parent village is much the same as it was 500 years ago.  This is a strong culture of hard work and family values.  Educating people with this type of character will improve the whole region.

Any community in the sacred valley that has a year-round supply of clean water will not only last, but it will thrive and so will it's residents.