Money raised earlier this year by Columbia Falls students to construct handwashing stations at rural schools in Guatemala has already been put to use.

In early February, Spanish classes at the Columbia Falls junior high, as well as several high school classes and an elementary class, raised funds for more than 12 handwashing stations for schools in the mountainous region surrounding the town of San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala.

The students’ funding of a dozen made a large dent in Los Buenos Vecinos’, the organization coordinating the effort, goal of providing at least 50 stations, known as “tippy taps,” to schools in the area.

The effort by Los Buenos Vecinos, which has gained national attention according to the organization’s Columbia Falls liaison Dave Renfrow, has succeeded in securing funding for 50 tippy taps, half of which have already been installed.

Los Buenos Vecinos plans to expand the water sanitation program —which not only includes tippy taps but an extensive educational component on the importance of handwashing— beyond the San Andres Itzapa region, said Renfrow.

The Guatemalan-based organization’s efforts are an attempt to combat the country’s 46% child malnutrition rate which is as much attributed to waterborne pathogens and poor handwashing hygiene causing diarrheal infections as it is to food insecurity, said Renfrow.

With most rural schools in the area having access to only two hours of water twice a week, students were dealing with toilets that couldn’t be flushed on top of an inability to adequately wash hands for most of the week, said Renfrow. The handwashing stations not only provide clean water for 100 people to wash their hands four times a day for four days, but they also catch the waste water, which is then used to flush the toilets.

The steps towards disease prevention that handwashing stations provide has led to recent reopenings of schools that had been closed for nearly a year by the country’s Ministry of Education due to lack of adequate sanitation facilities in the time of COVID-19.

Los Buenos Vecinos has received several testimonies of teary-eyed teachers grateful to have their schools open again, said Renfrow.

Efforts are underway to coordinate Zoom calls between Guatemalan and Columbia Falls students to celebrate the tippy taps.

“Cultivating those relationships of kids to kids — I just think that’s a better way to go about problem solving,” said Renfrow.