Some seventeen years ago, a young vet from Granada, José Luís Guirao Piñeyro, left Spain looking for another country where his skills could be useful. He went to the city Battambang (Cambodia) with the French NGO ACTION NORD-SUD, to work creating communal farms for refugees that fled from the Khmer Rouge terrorist activities.

Cambodia was then a society broken down by war: a great number of families didn’t know the whereabouts of many of their members, a multitude of women on their own with several children were far away from their places of origin, hundreds of people had undergone amputations because of anti-person mines and, everywhere one could see orphan or abandoned children begging or prostituting themselves to survive.

Faced with this situation, José Luís decided to involve himself more intensely and with friends and relatives help, he opened in June 1994 a house for street families, which has become Ptea Teuk Dong, The House of Coconut Water in the local language. We own our name to the fact that coconut water was used as an intravenous saline solution to heal people during the war. To José Luís the story gave him the idea of calling his first centre as the coconut water, because it would be a house where wounds could be healed and it would symbolize perfectly well the hope for a better life for the people that we intend to help. And so PTD, the first House of the Coconut Water, was born.

José Luís, looking for new horizons, travelled to Rwanda where there was a civil war between hutus and tutsis. Once again, José Luís tried to build a centre to take internally displaced orphans in, but Rwanda government drove all NGO off, so that they would not be witnesses to the citizens slaughter. By the end of 1996, José Luís went to Madagascar and after travelling around the island to get to know it, he found a city in the centre of the country (Fianarantsoa) with similar characteristics to Battambang: it had about 150.000 inhabitants, which suffered hunger and were neglected by poor governance and he realized that it was the place where he could settle and start afresh. In May 2001, another

House of the Coconut Water was established in Salvador de Bahía , Brazil, to implement a project related to health and occupational training of teenagers and mothers with a high risk of becoming prostitutes. The project ended in 2005. In 2003, José Luís set up in Tulear, a city in Madagascar, the NGO Bel Avenir. This Malagasy organization, whose technical coordinator is José Luís, becomes the House of the Coconut Water counterpart.