For thousands of villagers living in Indonesia’s rural regions, regular access to water is a luxury most have only heard about. Community members—usually the women and youth—spend hours each week traveling to nearby open springs or community wells to collect water that they use for personal consumption, for their animals, and for their subsistence farming activities. Lack of clean drinking water and poor sanitation mean that many of these families frequently suffer from a range of illnesses, including diarrhea, dengue fever, and malaria. In Java, the May 2006 earthquake exacerbated the problem, destroying access roads and cutting off remote communities even more, making life that much harder for hundreds of rural villages.

Nestled away in the green mountains of Central Java, the village of Pangkah is one such community. With about 100 households, the village is widespread as most residents are farmers. Until recently, their only source for drinking was a built up natural spring nearby where they would come regularly to collect water in buckets to carry back to their homes. Pangkah is one of 15 locations where CHF is building a integrated water supply system.

With all such water supply systems, CHF starts by involving the communities in the design and implementation process from day one. Through a consultative process that engages the locally selected water management committee, the system is designed by CHF’s water and sanitation engineers while construction is done entirely by people of Pangkah, with the support of CHF’s technical teams. This locally-driven process is in line with the Indonesian tradition of gotong royong, the idea that it is each individual’s duty to work together as a community, “shoulder by shoulder,” as well as with CHF’s mission to serve as a catalyst for positive change by engaging communities and empowering them through the development process.

What is particularly unique about the water systems CHF is installing is that they are primarily solar-powered which makes them far more effective in the long run for the communities to maintain. The communities are excited to have regular access to water—the new system will create a reliable source of water for each household for the first time. And the CHF staff, such as Widi an engineer who helped build this site, is equally excited as this is the first such system to be installed in this region. “My favorite part is talking to the community,” she says. “It feels good to hear from them what their problem is then being able to fix it.”

Widi has a degree in environmental conservation, so when she began working on the project, she decided to reach out to the government for a donation of trees to replace the ones they would have had to cut down to install the system. With Widi’s persistence, CHF has received 600 teak trees to plant around all the water pumping sites, yet another way that this project is helping Jogjakarta build back better and bring its people access to safe and “green” water.