THE GIFT IS IN THE GIVING, A SHORT NARRATIVE ON THE BENEFITS OF HUMANITARIAN WORK

Through a series of unusual persuasions created by some old friends in 2004 I was suddenly on an airplane on my way to Ethiopia to embark on my first humanitarian effort. After an initial one-day stop-over in Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Abba I was loaded onto a bus with thirty other people heading south about one hundred sixty-five miles to a region of twenty one villages in the Arsi Negelle District of Central Ethiopia. It was a grueling hot ride in the old bus with only one pit stop along the way ending on a dusty hillside where thousands of villagers had assembled to greet us and celebrate our coming. I was with a humanitarian company that was newly established in East Africa, Engage Now Foundation, that also had projects at that time in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. That was the beginning that changed my life forever.

Family Pit Latrine

 

Smokeless Stove Made from Adobe Bricks

 

Drip Irrigation System for Small Family Garden

 

Water Purification Unit (Bucket Sand Filter)

 

Community Workers Instructing Homeowner on Building a Smokeless Stove

 

Meeting of Women's Committee

I remained in Ethiopia for a little over one week that first trip, but I was hooked and immediately planned to return again to Ethiopia on the December 2004 Expedition sponsored by that same company. While I was there I realized, much to my surprise the large impact the group made on the villagers. It was a wakeup call to my otherwise skeptical view of what could be done in developing countries by a group of dedicated hard-working people in a short period of time. I found out that little efforts by someone invested in making a difference can improve the lives of the poorest of the poor in ways that would astound most skeptics. I had previously spent much time in Zambia and Algeria years before, but not on humanitarian ventures. On those visits I was working on large transfer of technology projects. I had experienced in those places that introducing costly, highly technical systems to the non-technical populations of developing countries was a long and arduous process. What I learned in that first week in Ethiopia, however, was that simple technologies, properly presented, using locally procured inexpensive materials and made sustainable was the answer to immediate and long-term change, and that it could be done with little cost and minimal effort if directed by someone with the skills and desire to make simple things work efficiently.

By the time I left Ethiopia after that first trip, I had decided that since I was already pretty much retired anyway, that I would turn over my life to humanitarian work. So between my first and second trip to Ethiopia I set about to develop a few simple technology instruction manuals that would make my work a little easier and would be something that could be translated into the local languages of the host countries where Engage Now Foundation had projects. My plan was to use these manuals to train locals that would then pass on that information to their respective villagers insuring that the new technologies we were introducing and the methods to use and maintain them would be sustainable. When I left the U.S. in December of that year for my second humanitarian visit to East Africa, I carried with me manuals on how to assemble a simple water purification system for families built from buckets and sand, how to build pit latrines, how to make an indoor smokeless stove and the manner in which drip irrigation projects for small family farms could be implemented. Those I put to work when I arrived in Ethiopia. By the time I left the country forty-five days later with help from dozens of community workers I had trained on the use of the manuals, there were over fifty new stoves that had been built in five of the twenty one target villages and over on hundred pit latrines finished and in use. In addition, dozens of families had started using drip irrigation systems on small gardens that saved them from carrying large amounts water to irrigate their gardens. These new irrigation technologies gave users the possibility for year-around harvests of nutritional vegetables, something that was only possible before when the only irrigation source was from rainwater. The dozens of water purification units we built during that time were also in use in family homes providing as much as ten liters of clean water for domestic use, with the possibility of totally eliminating the lecherous pathogens that were entering people’s bodies from the fetid water that was available to them from rivers . . . their only available water source.

The key to our success in Ethiopia was finding and employing committed Community Workers that could take the simple technologies we were introducing and carry them out to their respective villages and then teach the villagers how to implement them. In Ethiopia at this same time we also initiated a program of community education that involved women for the most part. We knew women were the key to making things change in their communities, so we began assembling these village women in what we called, Women’s Committees that met twice weekly and were trained by our community workers in simple technology use, hygiene, family income, small business, and functional literacy. When I left Ethiopia after my forth and longest visit there with Engage Now Foundation (I had remained thirteen months on the last visit in 2005-2006) there were over four thousand women meeting regularly, over two hundred community workers were functioning in twenty villages, thousands of stoves and latrines had been built and were in use by families, several hundred bucket sand filter water purification systems were in use, many water projects involving roofwater collection and storage had been initiated and many other projects had been started that involved new small businesses that the women created.

Community projects like these were unheard of before in these poor villages. Overall health had been improved significantly by use of purified water and new hygiene methods were started by families and women. Because they were spending less time gathering wood and fetching water the women were able to spend quality time with their children and tend to their gardens, thus improving family nutrition and were more committed to improving overall health of their families.

By 2006 Engage Now Foundation, while still operating under that name in Ethiopia, had formed an alliance with another humanitarian company out of South America and had changed its name to Ascend, A Humanitarian Alliance. I continued my work with the company developing more and more simple technology manuals and training modules associated with those and other simple technologies such as blacksmithing, water collection and distribution by pumps, greenhouse construction and management, beekeeping, building and using brick baking ovens, making and using adobe bricks, sewing and using sewing machines and others. In all over twenty-one field instruction manuals finally ended up in the archives of the company. Most had been translated into the Ethiopian language Amharic and several had been translated into Spanish.

After my last visit to Ethiopia I continued my work with Ascend, traveling and living in places like Mozambique, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. In each instance, I lived in those countries from two to six months each spending a total to over sixteen months doing the types of humanitarian work I had come to love in Ethiopia. It was always a gratification to know that so little effort could mean so much to people that were considered the poorest of the poor. I found that in most places people were highly committed to change and improvement of their living conditions, but in most cases either didn’t have the means to make those changes or tradition and culture had held them back from even challenging their conditions. This meant for me, careful assimilation into their activities, so as not to upset those traditions and cultures while introducing new systems that would ultimately force them to challenge their old ways. In some cases, mostly because of religious constraints, people resisted change, especially those that affected the lives of women. But when those people saw the benefit of taking on new ways of living, they took it upon themselves to make those changes, regardless of the pressures from their religious leaders, and in some cases with women, from their husbands.

Some of the most remarkable things that I observed as a result of mine and my colleagues’ humanitarian efforts were the rate at which villagers that had lived in primitive conditions all their lives, changed and adapted to those new technologies we were introducing. The changes were not only rapid, but were sustainable, and after they were implemented, people were looking at ways they could make them last. Many others seeing the benefits their neighbors were having from adopting those new simple technologies took the initiative to create them themselves. The major key to that success was the use of easy to find, locally available, inexpensive materials, and training of users on how to maintain those simple devices we introduced. In Mozambique’s Beira region where we pioneered the use of simple technology rope and washer pumps to lift water from shallow wells for domestic and irrigation use, we used all locally obtained materials to build the pumps. For the pulley, we used the sidewalls of used automobile tires, cement was locally available for making concrete for the splash pad and to hold the pump in place, plastic pipe used for gutters and potable water lines was locally available and cheap, wood for the pump frame, though rough was locally available and inexpensive. In most cases we built the pumps for under two hundred dollars each. The wells we hand-drilled with an auger…the only imported item. In the six months that I was in Mozambique I trained several entrepreneurs to build these pumps and drill the wells, hundreds of new wells now exist where in most instances people draw water out of open dangerous hand-dug wells with simple devices that lifted about one or two liters of water each time the device was brought out of the well by a stick with a rope attached to the bucket. The new rope and washer pumps were capable of lifting water from wells at a rate of up to fifteen to twenty liters per minute. This made it possible with little effort on the part of the child or adult cranking the pump to irrigate gardens as large as one half hectare (about 1 acre) and have those gardens be productive year around. Early on with the Engage Now Foundation (later Ascend, A Humanitarian Alliance) I was invited to become a Board Member and continued in that role as Ascend’s Technical Advisor on matters dealing with their humanitarian work in South America, and India.

In 2009 in addition to my continuing work with Ascend I was invited to become involved with a newly formed humanitarian organization, Machara, A Miracle Network, founded by two of the Lost Boys of Sudan. This project was focused on five villages in the Apuk Padoc region of the new country of South Sudan. It had as its goal the improvement of conditions of target villages that were decimated by the civil war that ravaged over twenty years between the north and south Sudanese. For this region, with a population of over seventy thousand people, I developed a Five Year Community Development Plan that focused on developing water resources, improving health and hygiene, building schools, installing pit latrines, assembling stoves for homes and generally improving the economic status of the community by creating entrepreneurs for small businesses with loans. The entire plan was based on our successful development work in Ethiopia. The program for Apuk Communities never got off the ground, initially because of funding, but later with the political situation in South Sudan becoming too untenable. The project I envisioned in the plan would have cost over two million dollars.

When the earthquake occurred in Port-au-Prince Haiti in February of 2010 I was asked by the founder of a humanitarian organization, Foundation for Children in Need, to assist with the logistics of rebuilding the wall surrounding a small orphanage that had been destroyed by the quake. The children were without security with their downed wall, and also lacked sleeping areas damaged by the earthquake. I went there in March of that year spending two months with the project finding and purchasing the materials that could be used to rebuild some seven hundred feet of eight foot high block wall to secure the facility. Nine masons from Utah went there to do the work, and in just two weeks completed the project and cleaned up the debris from the broken wall and downed buildings. With conditions as they were shortly after the quake, building materials and general logistics of obtaining and delivering the materials to the site was a nightmare. But we accomplished the task to the surprise and gratification of the orphanage management. At present work with the orphanage continues through regular expeditions sponsored by the Foundation and its dedicated staff.

In summary, humanitarian work is an effort that cannot be described adequately. It can only be experienced to know its value. Many companies and dedicated people embark in these efforts both locally and internationally, and almost all know after their experience that their lives will never be the same. It is an effort that takes time and sometimes large amounts of money, but in some instances, there are possibilities for high school and college students to become involved by serving as Interns with these established humanitarian organizations. The challenge awaits anyone interested in having a new and enlightening experience in their lives. If one wishes to have a gift such as this, the gift is in the given of one’s self. I for one have become a strong advocate through my own experiences, and will forever be grateful that I took the initiative to become involved.