Nearing the finish line

Co-founders Danny Sexton (left) and Peter Beaucage (right) at
the reservoir site for the Ganda Boya water supply project.

Danny and I just spent a week on the ground in Ethiopia meeting with contractors, community leaders, and partners as well as visiting the sites for the well, storage tank, and distribution points.   In brief, our partners at Haramaya University have retained local contractors for construction of the 3km pipeline from the well site to the community's high school and construction of the reservoir at the high school.  We have finalized the specifications for our well and are in the process of getting proposals from contractors for performing the work.  Thanks to the efforts our donors and volunteers around the world over the past few years, the project is finally taking off.

Solar-powered well at the Qerensa Dereba Primary School about
45 minutes from Ganda Boya.  The well has allowed local children
to spend more time in school and less time gathering water.  The
construction and installation of this well was supported by the Cincinnati
Rotary Club and the University of Cincinnati.

One of the most impactful parts of the visit, however, had little to do with our project.  We had the opportunity to visit a recently completed well sponsored by the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Rotary Club, and were able to talk with some local primary school students about the impacts of the well on their community.  One student told us about how he would be continuing on to university in the next year.  Countless others spoke of how grateful they were for the water and how it had allowed them to attend school and work at home rather than walking miles to fetch water.  It's one thing to talk about how having a local source of clean water impacts communities, but seeing the impacts firsthand is breathtaking.

Families fetch water from a hand pump near the borehole site.
The families will need to carry these 5-gallon cans of water
about 1.5 miles to their homes.

We also had the opportunity to meet with community leaders and others in the village of Ganda Boya and hear, again, how much of an impact the lack of water has on their lives.
With all that said, we're currently at a critical junction in our project.  If we can reach our $25,000 goal by September 31, we can proceed to signing contracts in the next two months and have the project substantially completed by this time next year.  However, as of today, we're about $3,500 short.

So, I'm excited to announce that everyone who donates $5 or more during August or September will be entered into a drawing to win a 250g (1/2 pound) bag of Tomoca coffee, freshly roasted in coffee's very own homeland of Ethiopia.

Girl carrying a small container of water along the road.

Girl Power

Not so long ago, I wrote about the impact PowerUp Ethiopia will have on the women and girls that walk miles and miles every day to carry water to their families in the village of Ganda Boya in eastern Ethiopia. The older women want to go to work, and the girls want to be able to go to school. They can't because they're too busy carrying the water (when they're not getting sick from it.) It's not an easy life.

Sydney's promotional material at
The Works' fundraiser on March 16.

But instead of re-telling the readers of this blog about the difficulty of life in Ganda Boya, today I want to share an incredible story from the other end of the international socioeconomic spectrum that testifies to the kind of things strong young women are truly capable of.

Sydney of Loveland, Ohio was one of eighty-three fourth graders that I spoke to a few months ago when asked to present PowerUp Ethiopia in a social studies class. Her school and its community have already been very generous in supporting PowerUp Ethiopia, but Sydney wanted to do even more.

Two months later, Sydney was ushering in guests to The Works, her father's pizza restaurant, for a fundraiser she had coordinated with a few of her friends. 10% of that night's revenue helped fund the project, and guests were offered the opportunity to "buy" a glass of water, just $1 each. Ten-year-old Sydney's efforts brought together enough money to buy an entire solar panel that will power the project's water pump.

Sydney is an outstanding example of the kind of potential that lives in young girls all over the world. Ganda Boya, Ethiopia is no exception. But while Sydney's potential was turned kinetic not least by having her basic needs met, over 1,000 women and girls in Ganda Boya lack basic access to clean water that will free their time to go to work and school.

Let's show the world what 1,000 more economically empowered women can do. A donation of even $15 buys one Ganda Boya resident his or her share of the water system we plan to build.

And just imagine what the women could do then.

Blog feature: Africans in the Diaspora

Just a quick post here: we've been featured on Africans in the Diaspora's blog! Africans in the Diaspora is a great organization based in Washington, DC that brings the development issues of the African continent to Africans spread all over the world. Our contact at AiD requested that this post be written by an Ethiopian, so we sent one of our volunteers in Addis Ababa out to the project site to interview people in their native tongue and write the post.

Read the post here: http://africansinthediaspora.org/blog/gonda-boy-needs-water/