Days 64(b) – 65: project visit (2)

We found out about Hope International through a friend who helps them raise funds in the UK (funding comes from Canada, Japan and the UK). They are a small charity working in remote villages in Ethiopia without access to clean drinking water. As a result, the people suffer from high infant mortality and lots of preventable diseases.

With money, solutions are easy to implement and not expensive; for the cost of a small extension to your house or a new upmarket kitchen it is possible to change the lives of literally thousands of people here (Dorze Bele, the main focus of my visit, has around 5,200 inhabitants).

It is a charity Haze and I support for a number of reasons. It is locally run and lean; your money goes to where it makes an impact. It offers a ‘hand up, not a hand out’; the projects only run if the villages proactively ask for them and village inhabitants provide all the labour (and any materials that are locally available). It is sustainable; there is no complex machinery so the locals can look after it themselves. It is transformative; what value would you place on your child not dying from an easily preventable disease?

Or at least that’s the theory. So I am here to see how the money has been spent, understand the context and get a feel for the credibility and character of the people running the programmes; I have no interest in investing in nice ideologies, only effective outcomes.

We have invested in two projects; primarily in Dorze Bele where the water system went live early in 2016 and, to a lesser extent, Kalebo Laka where construction is now nearing completion.

My visit starts at Dorze Bele where I get a feel for the environment, meet the team, check out the infrastructure, connect with the people and camp overnight. It is a fabulous experience and I get the answers I need. (I suggest you watch the video before reading on).

The thing that challenges me most is a discussion with the water caretakers and local health workers in the evening. They are village inhabitants who have taken specific responsibilities to maintain the project, crucially including after Hope have left (which happens after 12 months). I wanted to talk with them to understand their view of the project benefits and to hear any concerns or suggestions they might have. It is clear their environment has been transformed and one message comes over again and again from each of them. One caretaker holds his hand to one side of his chest, then the other. There are two parts of the kabale (district) he says; our side now have all these benefits; our brothers do not. This is not right, when will you fix this?

Actually you need to fix this; it’s your kabale. But you can’t do it alone and it would be amazing to help.

I spend the journey back to Arba Minch the next morning thinking about the opportunities for the kabale. Trade is the key. The have so much to offer; their weaving is beautiful and the area is ripe for lucrative eco-tourism. To earn the sort of money they require in order to pay for the water infrastructure, they need customers spending first world dollars, not third world birr. This is something I would like to explore further with Hope when I get home.

As I leave, the smiley lady at the end of the video sends her daughter to their house and presents me with a bag of their home grown avocados. They have so little this is a big sacrifice; I am really touched. [And, Simon Lamont, they were indeed ‘ripe and ready to eat’; a principle I tested in my breakfast roll the next morning].

We pause in Arba Minch to drop my bag at a hotel and grab some lunch before hitting the road again. The destination this time is the village of Kalebo Laka which is a bit further South and deeper into the mountain range. The journey in and out takes about 5 hours, including a detour to collect a support worker in one of the other villages who has contracted malaria and needs to get to hospital. I’d have paid just to take that car ride, it is so visually rich.

We meet with a newly formed women’s support group. Women have little status here; of the 20 in the group we meet, only 1 can read or write. It is their lives which are most changed by the water project as it is their job to fetch the water. The aim is to help them use their newly liberated time well, in particularly helping them to start small scale trading to supplement their subsistence farming. Earning income on their own also elevates their status in the community.

From there we climb down a steep hillside to inspect one of 3 newly capped springs, before visiting another nearby project where construction is underway today, collecting our malaria victim and heading back in the dark to Arba Minch.

It has been a special 36 hours. Addressing the impact of poverty is profoundly complex; no one person (the poor, charities/NGOs, donors) can solve it alone and it is a very imperfect science. But when you find yourself holding one of the jigsaw pieces that can help unlock the puzzle for even a few people, slotting it in place is maybe one of the best (and most humbling) feelings in the world. The rest of Ethiopia is going to have to go some to live up to this.

This blog is to share my travel experiences not to fundraise, but if you might be interested in ‘doing a village’ (alone or as a consortium) let me know. Then come and visit; I promise you it will be one of the best experiences of your life.