Photograph by Anne Lummerich Published July 9, 2009 It's hard to
find a job in the city. The jobs they can get—bus driver, street
vendor, construction worker—don't pay well. And the cheapest
area to live is high on steep hills on the edge of the city,
where landslides are common and water is scarce. German
conservationists and biologists Kai Tiedemann and Anne
Lummerich, who run Alimón, a small nonprofit that supports Latin
American development, are trying to help with the last of those
problems. Since 2006 they've been working with new settlements
on the outskirts of Lima to set up special nets that scoop water
directly from the air. Rain rarely falls on these dry hills. The
annual precipitation in Lima is about half an inch (1.5
centimeters), and the city gets its water from far-off Andean
lakes. But every winter, from June to November, dense fog sweeps
in from the Pacific Ocean. With a few thousand dollars and some
volunteer labor, a village can set up fog-collecting nets that
gather hundreds of gallons of