To build a house you need ...

Water!

We think about bricks, cement, lumber, and other materials, but construction of a 4 Walls house also requires a lot of water. According to Pepe, our building manager, each house requires about 8 cubic meters of water. That's more than 2000 gallons.

The critical ingredient that holds it all together.

"Cement reacts with water through a process called concrete hydration," says Wikipedia. It "hardens over several hours to form a matrix that binds the materials together."  Water also has to be applied to all the surfaces that touch the bricks walls, so that the mortar maintains its adhesive capacity and the water does not seep out of the mortar and into the bricks or wooden supports.

Some families have a hard time accessing the 2000 gallons of water that we need for their 4 Walls houses. This is Lula, who made twenty trips to the well every morning before work started.

This family put the neighbors and kids to work, carrying water up a rocky, steep embankment from the river.

La bomba (the pump)

The 4 Walls Project is glad to report, that after years of difficult and dangerous trips to the water source with buckets and bottles in hand, we have a pump.

In the video below, Pepe (in Spanish) demonstrates the efficiency, the luxury, the miracle of our new bomba.