‘SACRED’ RESERVOIRS
As glaciers shrink, Peruvian sisters seek traditional solution to water woes
About 40 years ago, the snow that once covered the Andes mountains near the Peruvian city of Ayacucho started to disappear.
Water became scarce for more than 200,000 people in the south-central region, most of them from the Quechua Indigenous community.
“We had to ration water. Some years, we had water for only two hours a day,” said Dersi Zevallos, a co-ordinator with Peru’s water and sanitation regulator, SUNASS.
Then, Quechua sisters Magdalena and Marcela Machaca — both agricultural engineers — found a solution by looking to the past. They built reservoirs high in the mountains to harvest and “cultivate” rainwater, the same way their ancestors did.
Climate change has led to increasingly dry conditions for communities in the Peruvian Andes, figures shows.
In 1984, around 130 centimetres of rainwater fell in Ayacucho, SUNASS said. Now the city gets only half that much rain every year.
Glaciers, another source of water for the Quechua, have also been affected by warming temperatures.
Across Peru, glaciers lost nearly 30 per cent of their area between 2000 and 2016, says a study published last September in geosciences journal The Cryosphere.
“Climate is a living being to us,” Marcela said. “And lately it’s been acting a little crazy.”
To help cope with the situation, constructed mountaintop reservoirs, which locals call lagoons, capture and store water during the rainy season, from November to February, she explained on a tour of one she and her sister built.
In the dry season, the water filters through the ground to recharge the rivers and aquifers used by local authorities to provide water to residents and farms.
“The lagoons play the role that the frozen mountaintops used to play,” Marcela said.
The Quechua people consider the reservoirs sacred, she noted, believing they “nurture” water at the start of its life. “Our communities are the protectors of water and we are proud of that,” she said.
The sisters built their first reservoir back in 1995 through their organization, the Bartolome Aripaylla Association, which uses traditional knowledge to help Indigenous communities improve their economic activities.
Since then, they have built more than 120, which together provide Ayacucho with more than 130-million cubic metres of water for human and agricultural use.
Sally Bunnings, a water management expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said the effect of climate change on mountain glaciers, which are melting as global temperatures rise, poses a threat to high-altitude communities. They should follow the Quechua example of trying to use water resources as efficiently as possible, she said.
“From an early age, they should learn to (recognize) and prevent the effects of abrupt change in temperature and make good use of water,” she said.
Almost a quarter of Peru’s population identifies as Quechua, making up the country’s largest ethnic group, the latest census in 2017 shows.
Marcela said she and her sister first heard about the ancient spiritual practice of “nurturing water” through their grandfather when they were children in the 1970s.
By that time, it was no longer practised, she said.
Then, just as the snow in Ayacucho’s mountains started to dwindle, conflict came to the area.
Ayacucho became the base for the Maoist rebel group Shining Path, which launched a bid to overthrow the state in 1980. Some 70,000 people were killed before the conflict ended.
The El Nino weather phenomenon hit Peru in 1992, making water even more scarce. That was when the sisters were motivated to build their first artificial lagoons, Magdalena said, choosing natural landscapes already shaped like reservoirs to reduce the amount of digging. With agreement from local communities and authorities, they seal leaks with soil and plant native ferns that keep the soil firm, naturally filter the water and shelter birds.
The sisters create small canals to let water escape and prevent the reservoir overflowing in heavy rains, and those take water to the mountain communities. They also recharge the aquifers used for the city’s water supply.
The city government cannot fund the construction of the reservoirs, which cost about $1 million each, Magdalena said. But the government does give the sisters technical advice.
“If we didn’t have these lagoons now, we could not guarantee water for the whole population. They’re completely vital,” said Zevallos of SUNASS.