Stories from Ganda Boya, Part Three: Menuit's Story

Menuit is lucky, relatively. Unlike most of the people in Ganda Boya and the surrounding communities, she has managed to get a job at Haramaya University’s ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) Center. Even with such a privileged position, she still struggles with the lack of access to water in Ganda Boya: she told me that she gets water from the university’s single house tap located at the wall separating the village from the university once every three days or so.

On other days, she goes to the lake to collect water just like everyone else. Her support network allows her to both collect water sometimes and work most days of the week, but her situation is extremely rare.

Menuit also complained that the tap water they drink from the university has made her and baby sick twice already – two times too many. Such illnesses were no minor matter for the two; they both were hospitalized in the university clinic.

Menuit at the only water tap in Ganda Boya,
waiting for it to turn on.

Menuit’s story represents a rare break in the refrain of hardship that I heard from the other villagers, but she still clearly faces the same challenges as everyone else. First, even with a support network, the time it takes to get water may at some point impact her job if her family is unable to pitch in. Second, no amount of work in Ganda Boya makes the existing water resources clean, and her family’s medical record shows it. Water insecurity is water insecurity whether you work or not, no matter how you cut it.

Worse still, the tap where I met Menuit was the one where she had been waiting for over an hour to capture just a part of the trickle from the university tap. When I left her, the tap, is if on cue, came on, and I watched around 150 people scramble and shove their way to getting a jerrycan under the drips of life-sustaining resource.

We’re here to change all of this. Even Menuit is unfortunate in her relative fortune, and Concordia Humana’s solar-powered well will give round-the-clock access to clean drinking water right in the heart of Ganda Boya, where villagers can spend almost no time accessing its plenty. Together, we can make it happen.

Menuit’s Story is the third part of a four part series on stories directly from Concordia Humana’s PowerUp Ethiopia pilot village, Ganda Boya. For more updates, visit this blog at powerupethiopia.blogspot.com, follow us on Twitter (@PowerUpEthiopia), and Like us on Facebook (facebook.com/ConcordiaHumana).

Stories from Ganda Boya, Part Two: Hindia's Story

Hindia is a young woman in her late twenties that lives in a village nearby Ganda Boya called Tinike. When I stopped her in the middle of Ganda Boya for an interview, she was carrying empty yellow jerrycans to Lake Haramaya to fill them with water and return home. She had been walking for about 15 minutes, and had another two hours to go until she was back home with water for her household.

Hindia, a resident of a village near Ganda Boya.

She does this two hour chore multiple times per day for the amount of water most Americans use in a ten-minute shower. When Concordia Humana finishes the well, each trip will yield the same amount of water, but will be reduced to a much shorter errand of 15-20 minutes roundtrip.

I asked her what she will do with the extra time our well will afford her. Hindia replied that she will have time for a job at Haramaya University, which is located a short walk away. And she isn’t the only one. Abdusalem, the elected representative of Ganda Boya and our contact point for the village, said his village is full of people like Hindia, who come from many other places to live at the edge of the university in the hopes of finding a job and earning a better life.

She looked hopeful, and I asked her if she had ever gotten sick from the water that she drinks now. Her face fell, and she didn’t mention an illness of her own, but rather alluded to a miscarriage from the strain of carrying the water. Out of respect, I didn’t press any further. 

My final question for her was this: how does it make you feel to that people in the United States and around the world will hear your story?

“If the American people decide to help us, it will be as though I am reborn.”

Every five dollars you decide to donate puts one meter of pipe in the ground that brings water a meter closer to Hindia, and to all of Ganda Boya. Will you donate $5 or more today?

This blog post is part of a four-part series bringing stories from the Ethiopian village of Ganda Boya to support Concordia Humana's PowerUp Ethiopia project, a solar-powered well building project. Check back soon for Part Three: Menuit's Story.

Stories from Ganda Boya, Introduction and Part One: Fayo's Story

On my first day in Ganda Boya, I had the opportunity to meet the people who will benefit from our work and your donations. Personally, I didn’t expect to hear anything that our blog posts haven’t already said before: the villagers are getting sick from the water, the villagers are missing school and don’t have jobs because they have to get water, the work is very hard for the villagers.

Until I met the people and shook their hands, I did not realize the power of the first person over that of the third person.

Three young Ganda Boya villagers pointing to where they have to walk to
fetch water – just before the hills in the background.

Consider how different these words sound, coming from someone with whom you have shaken hands:

“I am getting sick from the water I drink.”

“I miss school in the morning because I need to get water.”

“I am unable to work because my family will not have anything to drink if I do not fetch them water.”

“This work is very, very hard for me.”

In four parts, I will post the stories of three individuals, Fayo, Hindia, and Menuit, who carry five-gallon (20-liter) jerrycans of pond water uphill a mile and a half (2km) every day, and one of myself when I decided to evaluate just how difficult this chore was by trying it myself. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t a walk in the park.)

So without further ado, Part One: Fayo’s Story.

***

Fayo is what you might expect of any young girl in any country: a little bashful, firm in the things she understands of the world and spooked by those she does not, and with a strong heart to care for her baby brother. When I arrived at the village, everyone ran out of their houses to see the newcomer, and Fayo was the first person I picked out of the crowd of excited children to tell me more about what it’s like for a kid to grow up in a village with no electricity and no running water.

Fayo with her baby brother.

When I moved closer to her and squatted down, I saw that Fayo was carrying an infant wrapped in a white linen blanket on her back. The infant was her baby brother, who she takes care of while her mother, Hawa, does other chores during the day. Each morning at five o’clock (well before sunrise), Hawa and Fayo start walking to a pool of standing water to carry yellow plastic jerrycans, five liters for Fayo and twenty for her mother. I asked Fayo how old she was, but she seemed to think such a question was silly, and guessed that she was eight.

She couldn't say exactly how long the chore of getting water every morning took, but one leader from the village estimated that the walk to the pool took about half an hour, and carrying the full containers uphill back to the village took a full hour.

The economic impact of this activity on her is clear: such work cuts into her Grade 2 school day, and she reported that there were several days per week when she missed some of her classes in the morning to get water. The lasting effect of this will be that she will likely end up like many Ganda Boya villagers, with a perforated education through her elementary years and a return to subsistence agriculture in her teenage years. Not only that, but she told me that this chore often prevents her from having anything to eat until lunchtime at school.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about my short chat with Fayo was that she didn’t seem to see anything extraordinary in the fact that she carries water uphill twice per day every day, or that she had never in her life had access to running water. She became even shyer when I told her that people in America and all over the world would hear her story. Are things somehow different there?

Together, we can prevent Fayo and all of her fellow villagers from spending such valuable schooling and work hours collecting unsafe water for their households. The world is becoming a smaller and smaller place: it only takes one person like Fayo to speak and one to post on the web for a story to come alive and to make an impact for a village of 2,000 people.

You can bring safe running water to Ganda Boya. We’re all in this together.

Check back soon for Part Two: Hindia’s Story.

Five Years Strong: An Open Letter from the Founders

On June 1, 2009, five years ago today, we filed the Articles of Incorporation for Concordia Humana Corporation. At the time, we were eager to expand Donuts for Darfur, a fundraiser Danny started at our high school in Cincinnati, Ohio in response to the Sudanese refugee crisis, into an organization at various colleges. The suggestion to start a nonprofit started almost jokingly, aided by the most dangerous of questions: “Really, why not?” With a name translated by our high school Latin teacher, five friends, and the formidable momentum of $10,000+ from successful donut sales, we set out to save the world.

Today, as Danny meets with contractors in Addis Ababa, Peter balances engineering of a solar water supply system for an Ethiopian high school with research on energy technologies, the thought of five high school seniors drawing up Articles of Incorporation over AOL Instant Messenger and meeting in a friend’s basement to sign them (before an evening of watching movies from Blockbuster) seems almost comical. It’s fair to say that none of us could have foreseen where Concordia Humana would go when we signed the original Articles of Incorporation. And, though we are indeed in a better position now than ever before, the path here wasn’t entirely smooth. We had to resolve a number of issues – from operating a geographically-separated organization on a shoestring overhead budget to striking the right balance between autonomy and oversight of student-led chapters around the country. And we’re stronger now than ever before for having resolved these issues.

Of course, we cannot look back on our history without acknowledging those who gave and continue to give so generously of their time and talents to make us who we are today. We were assisted in national expansion by chapters at a number of universities across the US and Canada, a host of volunteers, as well as former national Board members Ryan Finke, Nicandro Iannacci, Kyle Hird, and Emma Cevasco. We are the organization we are today because of the efforts of all these people. And, of course, we are aided in our current work by a phenomenal Board of Directors, including both people involved in Donuts for Darfur from the very beginning and some new faces as well. Matt, Claire, and Patrick work tirelessly week after week to keep our organization on course and complete projects. We are eternally grateful for the help of all our supporters and volunteers over the past five years – without them, the organization wouldn’t be even close to it’s current position. Through a network of volunteers in Ohio, New York, Washington DC, Switzerland, and Ethiopia, we have found that the power of people, even on a tight budget, is the most powerful tool in bringing power to people through economic development.

Like the organization itself, our current project started as a far-off dream. We had long discussed a dream of directly doing sustainable development work and, after independently doing such work in India and Ethiopia, we again asked ourselves, “Really, why not?” Building on Peter’s experience installing solar power systems in Ethiopia and Danny’s experience in working for the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement in India, we’re well on our way to realizing that dream: a sustainable development effort run and funded by our own volunteers, aimed at radically improving the lives of those in the developing world.

Over the past five years, we’ve had unimaginable growth. What will our ten-year letter look like? We brim with excitement with what we’ll be writing then.

Onward,

Danny Sexton and Peter Beaucage

Co-founders of Concordia Humana

School-Aged, World-Minded

Before you read any further in this post, I want you to think about something. Think back to when you were 9 years old. What were you doing? What did you care about? What got you excited?

Thought about it? Let me tell you mine: I was playing soccer most of the days, I was interested in the girls across the classroom from me, I wanted nothing more than to be like Ken Griffey Jr. and my favorite part of the day was coming home to go outside and play with my friends. All I knew about the rest of the world was what Steve Irwin showed me on TV.

Friday I got a chance to see some fourth graders who are excited about something much more powerful. St. Columban elementary school in Loveland, Ohio is not that different from any other Catholic grade school, except for one thing: they've heard about our project building a solar-powered well in Ethiopia and wanted to help. So what do you do when you're in elementary school? You start a lemonade stand. When I entered the school I was greeted by the announcements over the PA system, most of which was centered on three students from the class doing their own personal version of a commercial for their lemonade stand. I walked into their classroom and immediately was swamped by questions:

"When is the well going to be built?"

"Can you send us pictures when it's done?"

"How do you get the money there?"

"How much more money do we need to get?"

"Can we help more?"

"Did you HEAR our commercial???"

I'd never heard kids so excited about development projects before. The one day lemonade stand? They had to run it over the next month and a half because so many kids wanted to help that they literally didn't have space or time to fit them all in. As if that wasn't enough, there were two sets of friends who decided that as much as they liked what we were doing, they wanted to help even more. So every day when they get home they stand on their street corner for an hour selling lemonade. And all that money? It all goes to PowerUp. The kids were jumping around they were so excited to help out others. One came up to me after and said that he'd been looking forward to working in the lemonade stand all week; more than the school play, more than going to play soccer, more than the start of the baseball season even. They wanted pictures, they wanted stories, they wanted to know what we were doing. These aren't kids doing this because the teacher said so, there wasn't a parent standing over them saying "You should do this", they came up with the idea themselves, they started the plan themselves, they were the ones who decided to help out the children in Ethiopia.



Sam and Drew set up their own stand at their homes
to help build a well for another school in Ethiopia

As the head of fundraising and development at Concordia Humana, when someone hears what I do it usually elicits the same sort of response: "Oh my God, that's so amazing! You're doing so much to save the world, it's really wonderful!" This sort of praise belongs to everyone who is involved in our mission, in any way. What do I do? I organize events, I help to run things, I volunteer whenever I can and I set things up. But in the end, what I do is nothing without the rest of the people who help out PowerUp. You want to talk about people saving the world? Look at the fourth graders at St. Columban, look at the students of St. Xavier High School who raised over $1000 for us as a mission collection, look at YOU. YOU are saving the world, YOU are helping children in Ethiopia go to school, YOU are giving them a chance in the world. Not me. You.

We believe in people like the children in Loveland, who care so much about other people they've never met that they don't even give a second thought to missing an hour of TV; they forget about extra time playing video games; and they choose instead to help others. You want something to look forward to in the future? Look forward to these kids and the fact that they're only getting started.

How do you get inspired?

What's the big deal about water?

As fundraising and engineering efforts for PowerUp Ethiopia surge onward, I thought I'd take a moment to share some in-depth answers to the two most common questions we get on the PowerUp project and on our general approach to development.

Water doesn't seem that important in the grand scheme of things.  Aren't there more important issues to target?

The ubiquitous roadside sight of people
carrying water and firewood.

One of the first things that strikes you as you drive in rural Ethiopia is the number of women and children walking along the side of the road, invariably carrying one of two things: a 3-gallon water bottle or a bundle of firewood.  Talking to these people, you come to learn that a tremendous amount of time is spent walking to and from places with wood and water - a typical average might be 5-6 hours in a day!  In those six hours, a child could go to school, a woman could start a business, and a family might begin to lift themselves out of poverty. When we give someone clean water nearby, we have effectively given them a tremendous amount of time with which to learn, farm, start a business, and otherwise combat poverty.  We're pumping water, yes, but we're also giving people the most valuable resource of all - time.

Why use solar power in Ethiopia when it isn't cost-effective in the United States?

The single fact that characterizes the role of energy in development more than any other is that the cost of energy has a strong correlation with the income and development level.  In highly-developed countries such as the United States, energy from the electric grid is always on and extremely cheap - as low as 6 cents per kWh.  In places like Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, the situation is somewhat similar - there's access to grid electricity at somewhat reasonable rates.  The power isn't as reliable or cheap as in the developed world, but it's mostly there.

The school we're installing a well at, on the other hand, would be a challenging place to get power in the United States.  It's half a mile from any road, 10 miles of harsh terrain from any grid power, and once you get to the grid, reliability is spotty at best.  Bringing grid electricity to the school is a six-figure USD investment with significant long-term upkeep costs.

Solar equipment, on the other hand, is ideally suited for this type of project, for a few reasons:

From GeoModel Solar: Compare the sun's
brightness in Africa with Europe or the eastern US.

1. No batteries. Because water can be stored aboveground in tanks, no battery backup to the solar system is needed - when the sun shines, the tank fills, and when the sun doesn't shine, water can still be drawn from the tank.  
2. No maintenance.  Even in the developed world, power lines need to be repaired from time to time.  In our solar system, no grid power lines means very little maintenance.
3. The perfect location. Africa receives a higher level of solar irradiance (sun brightness, for the non-geeks) than any other place on Earth. A given size solar panel will produce more energy in Ethiopia than in many other places.
4. Most importantly, the lowest total cost of ownership. Though the solar equipment has a high upfront cost, there's no kerosene generator fuel to buy and no grid power bills to pay and lines to maintain.  And combining these advantages with the fact that we don't need to use costly batteries and inverters drives the cost even lower.

Concordia Humana cares deeply about efficient and responsible operations - so much so that we made cost efficiency one of our core values.  We chose to pursue solar technology after studying the alternatives and verifying that it has the lowest cost of ownership in this particular application.

If you have any other questions, post them in the comments!  If you couldn't tell, I love talking about these issues and thinking about them from new perspectives.

Peter

Our first fundraiser!

Just in time for the holidays, Danny and I (plus Brian, my fiancé) held the first fundraiser for PowerUp Ethiopia at the Whole Foods Market in Mason, Ohio. Our initial push was to gift-wrap in exchange for donations, but it turned out that people were more willing to just learn about the project and drop a few dollars in the jar than to have us wrap up their presents!

Left to right: Danny Sexton, Brian Beams, Claire Liegel.
Photo credit: Whole Foods Market, Mason, Ohio.

Overall, we raised almost $350 over the six hours we spent talking with Whole Foods' generous customers, and we also had a huge spike in website traffic over the next few days.

Still, we have a long way to go before we meet our $15,000 goal, so stay on the lookout for future announcements of PowerUp Ethiopia fundraisers around the city!