On a blisteringly hot morning in this small coastal city, by 7:00 a.m., 17-year-old Cora Tucker is already up and working. Slim and shy in skinny blue jeans, she sports a sparkly hairclip in her tight black curls. Her small red cell phone is ever at hand.
Despite her demure appearance, she’s doing a tough job unusual for a young woman anywhere, acting as general contractor for five male workers who toil in the hot sun. They’re constructing a bathroom for their client, Limbord Bucardo, a 29-year-old agroforestry engineer. His house, which will likely take another few years to finish, as he is able to afford materials and labor, is not much more than its exterior concrete brick walls.
But the shape of his bathroom is clearly in place, work that Tucker is managing, overseeing and even doing herself, from cutting rebar to mixing and pouring concrete to slapping on mortar and setting bricks. Her job is to install the foundation and plumbing for a pour-flush toilet with on-site treatment, still a luxurious rarity in Bilwi, even though it is the capital of this autonomous region.
Every morning, after making sure all the requisite tools and materials have been carried over from a nearby makeshift storeroom, Tucker and her crew get to work. Nothing happens unless she is on-site and in charge, an anomaly in a society where men usually hold the purse strings and power.
“What we’re trying to do is have these young people learn how running their own business works. We try not to step in,” explains Sherry Dixon, who helps to promote the microfinance program that has lent Bucardo the funds for his home construction. “It’s up to them to purchase local materials and get them to the site.”
The third youngest of seven children, ranging in age from two to 22, Tucker shares with them a small, windowless wooden shack in the neighborhood of San Judas. To reach her home, a one-story room with a patched, rusted corrugated tin roof and walls, she walks up a red dirt path shaded by tall palm trees. It has no running water. An uncovered, unwalled deep hand dug well sits barely 15 feet from its front door, where her infant nieces wander; several children each year in the region tumble down a local well to their deaths.
Tucker once attended the nearby secondary school, donning its tidy uniform of navy blue skirt and white blouse and socks. But, after her mother abandoned the family two years ago, most maternal responsibilities—laundry, cooking and childcare—fell onto her slim shoulders instead.
School was no longer an option.
Tucker’s new job is part of a pilot program initiated here in mid-2013 by WaterAid, a global water and sanitation nonprofit working in Nicaragua since 2011. “This is a new area to work in and it’s not easy,” admits Joshua Briemberg, WaterAid’s country director overseeing the project. “There are a lot of elements to it and a lot of people involved. It’s not like working on something familiar, and we don’t take a traditional development approach. This is very innovative work, really, because we’re not limiting our focus to sanitation. We’re talking about an array of options, from access to safe water, to installing a pour-flush toilet with a bathing area” —the kind that Bucardo has chosen and Cora’s crew is building for him.
When it’s finished, his bathroom will be the pride of the neighborhood, and his two small children, Lynsay and David Emmanuel, will enjoy a level of comfort, cleanliness and luxury that some locals—still getting by with bucket baths and outdoor defecation—can barely yet imagine.
Photo by Rodrigo Cruz
For more on The Cora Tucker Story, order your copy of the February/March issue here.
