The community of El Balsamo consists of 142 people who live in 30 houses. The village of El Balsamo is 4 kilometers from the main town of the San Lorenzo municipality, also in Boaco province. Like most of the beneficiaries of El Porvenir projects, the villagers are primarily subsistence farmers, growing corn, beans and millet, and raising domestic animals for home consumption. The average monthly income is about $65 per family; some of the men hire out on the larger farms nearby when there is work. The existing water system was built by the community with support from the Juan XXIII Center in Nicaragua, in 1993. The system is a spring capture/gravity flow water project which brings water from a mountain spring down to the village. When the spring began to dry up in summer, the villagers found another spring which did not dry up, and sought help in improving their water supply. Finding none, they tried to tie in the second spring to the existing system with a rudimentary springbox and hoses, the few materials they could afford. The rustic extension which they built is full of leaks.