When Geoffery Martino was a youngster, he had to swim across the Housatonic River to pass a swim test.
It was 1955. He passed the test mere hours before the water spilled its banks and destroyed much of the Valley.
“Maybe I’ve had water on my mind all my life,” he said.
Now the Derby-born and bred Martino has taken this obsession to Guatemala.
For the past several years, Martino has operated Rios a La Lluvia [Rivers to Rain], an organization he founded that seeks to document and record how much water flows in and out of the Rio Mayuelas watershed surrounding the village of Gualan, from which roughly 20,000 people get their water.
The idea, Martino concedes, is difficult to describe. We use water all the time, but “we have very little idea of how much water is actually going into a system, especially in a country like Guatemala,” he said.
Martino fell in love with Guatemala in the 80s, when he was randomly assigned there after joining the Peace Corps.
“I remember John F. Kennedy, he was one of my boyhood heroes, and he started the Peace Corps. I always liked that idea, and it never left me,” he said.
The Peace Corps asked Martino to return to Guatemala after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed nearly 20,000 people across Central America, and devastated the landscape through landslides and massive flooding.
Trained as a landscape designer at the University of Massachusetts, Martino did a map study of the area’s disaster vulnerability.
“Seeing these landslides — and there were hundreds of them — I knew that the damage would be long term,” he said.
It was after mapping and analyzing the destruction that Martino thought to start collecting data from the area’s watershed.
“I said, ‘There’s gotta be a connection between the natural condition of a watershed, and the quality of water, the amount of water you’re gonna have, so why not start monitoring?’”
Martino describes the area around Gualan as rugged and extremely rural, with 6,000 foot peaks as little as 11 miles from the coast.
“The idea is that you have more control over your own immediate physical environment,” Martino said.
“Right now this data isn’t going to do much, but in the future yes,” he said, adding that the data will give locals a basis from which to accept or reject development projects based on their own water needs.
In 2008 the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture helped the organization gain legal non-profit status, though Martino has been collecting data since 2006.
Martino said that the ministry’s help saved the organization quite a bit of money.
“Think of the Housatonic basin. You’ve got a large tributary, the largest is the Naugatuck River. But you’ve got several others. And each little stream that goes into it is a water basin. You’ve got 8‑mile brook, 2‑mile brook, you name it all the way up to the source.”
Martino explains that we, in the Naugatuck Valley or in other semi-urban places in the United States, don’t think of rivers and water supplies like this.
We turn the tap and water comes out, we get our food in the supermarket, and so on.
In a place like Guatemala however, watersheds supply drinking water and irrigation for farming. The idea of collecting data about the volume of water is, for Martino, as if a hundred years ago scientists collected and documented data about climate change.
“This is the future,” Martino said.
HELP FROM THE ACADEMY
Back in Connecticut, a friend from Martino’s UMass days put him in touch with Glenn Warner, a professor and hydrologist in the state Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Warner is another former Peace Corps volunteer who specializes in water resources, and gave Martino equipment for measuring rainfall, along with technical advice for the project.
“I admire him a lot for his persistence and dedication to this goal he has — with no reward to himself really,” Warner said of Martino. “He’s one of those individuals we need more of in the world.”
