News stories by Edgardo Ayala, page 2

VICTORIA, El Salvador, Jul 17 (IPS) - Setting up a community water project with a solar-powered pumping system was an unlikely idea for the peasant families of a Salvadoran village who, despite their doubts, turned it into reality and now have drinking water in their homes.

NAHUIZALCO, El Salvador, May 06 (IPS) - A group of children participating in an immersion program in Náhuat, the language of the Pipil people and the only remaining pre-Hispanic language in El Salvador, are the last hope that the language will not die out.

SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador, Mar 20 (IPS) - Faced with the recurring problem of environmental pollution caused by the poultry industry in rural communities in El Salvador, some companies are responding by producing biogas from organic waste from their chicken farms and processing plants, and using the gas to generate clean electricity.

SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador, Mar 01 (IPS) - In a win-win relationship, a segment of El Salvador's agribusiness industry is taking steps to ease the tension of the historic socio-environmental conflict caused by poultry and pig farms, whose waste has caused concern and anger in nearby communities.

SAN SALVADOR, Jan 30 (IPS) - Decades of civil wars and a lack of long-term public education policies, among other problems, have made higher education in Central America precarious and costly in general.

TECOLUCA, El Salvador, Nov 30 (IPS) - For farmers in the valleys below the 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric plant in central El Salvador, the rains bring floods. Now that the rains are more unpredictable, the loss of crops and disruption of fishing are even more devastating as they deal with erratic climate-change-induced flooding.

For decades, poor fishing and farming communities in southern El Salvador have paid the price for the electricity generated by one of the country's five dams, as constant and sometimes extreme rains cause the reservoir to release water that ends up flooding the low-lying area where the families live.

CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador, Nov 07 (IPS) - Neither the central government nor most of El Salvador's 262 municipalities have had the capacity to install enough wastewater treatment plants to prevent it from being discharged directly into the environment.

SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador, Oct 10 (IPS) - The effects of El Niño on agriculture in Central America are once again putting pressure on thousands of small farmer families who are feeling more vulnerable economically and in terms of food, as they lose their crops, due to climate change.

SAN SALVADOR, Aug 03 (IPS) - Pregnancies among girls and adolescents continue unabated in Central America, where legislation to prevent them, when it exists, is a dead letter, and governments are influenced by conservative sectors opposed to sex education in schools.

SUCHITOTO, El Salvador, Jul 25 (IPS) - A new technology that has arrived in rural villages in El Salvador makes it possible for small farming families to generate biogas with their feces and use it for cooking - something that at first sounded to them like science fiction and also a bit smelly.