Ethiopia has finally stabilized, but 50 million people here still walk up to four hours per day to collect dirty water from open sources.
charity: water’s wells are saving lives with clean water and bringing opportunity to communities in need.
We’re seeking help. Please pass his story onto doctors, neurologists or anyone who knows specialists in Ethiopia who could diagnose and possibly treat him.
After six days in the field shooting footage for our upcoming September Campaign, we’re due for a little break. We sit to stretch our legs and recap the week with staff from our partner organization, Relief Society of Tigray (REST), at a local juice joint across the street from their six-story office building.
“You heard about Fissiha, did you?” asks REST’s Water Program Director, Getachew.
I’m digging into my avocado + mango concoction, sitting next to my husband and charity: water’s CEO, Scott. We both render blank expressions. “No, who’s that?” I casually ask.
Fissiha was a loyal employee of REST and a father of four, Getachew tells us. He was a field coordinator for water projects and passionate about serving the poor in the most remote, rural areas. Since charity: water’s work here is almost entirely in the countryside, Fissiha naturally spent most of his time coordinating the construction of charity: water projects.
“He was always coming in my office saying that we must expand, we must go to the south, the people in the south need water so badly!” Getachew told us. Nine months ago, Fissiha got his wish. REST sent him to Southern Ethiopia with eight other water experts to train another local organization on constructing hand-dug wells.
That’s where everything changed for him.
“You know, why don’t we go visit him?” Getachew says, interrupting his own story. “He remembers charity: water and asks me from time to time, ‘Oh! How is Scott? How is the work going?’”
We pay our bill, jump in the car and in minutes, we’re walking through Fissiha’s front door. His daughter, who looks about 15 years old, doesn’t say a word but grabs two barking dogs and quickly ties them up.
Then, she runs inside. Her father walks out, holding her elbow and asking in a whisper where he should step. Getachew explains in Tigrinya (the local language) that Scott and Vik from charity: water have come to visit him. Fissiha smiles and feels around for our hands. I place mine in his and say hello.
I can’t help but notice his eyes are a deep red color and severely swollen. A thick film has formed over them that I can’t imagine going away anytime soon. We sit down in the small living room and I ask if he could please explain exactly what happened to him. I take out my notepad, ready to document everything, hoping that we’ll have access to resources in the U.S. that can help him.
This is Fissiha’s story:
While working in a malaria-prone southern region of Ethiopia, Fissiha noticed some unusual pain in his nose. Then, it started to swell.
His co-workers rushed him to an ill-equipped, local clinic. The nurse there had no way to test for malaria, but gave him two injections anyway: Fansidar, an anti-malarial agent, and Quinine, another anti-malarial that has been used since as early as the 1940s.
Fissiha left the clinic but his condition didn’t improve. Within 24 hours, he was shivering and experiencing joint pain.
He tried another local clinic where, without any tests, he received Fansidar again, along with other medications he can’t remember. Clinicians told him they thought he either had cerebral malaria (a type that infects the brain) or yellow fever, but they had no way of knowing for sure.
Within six hours, Fissiha was vomiting severely, and his face began to swell.
He made it to a third clinic, a bigger one where doctors could finally run many tests, but they still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They suggested he was having an allergic reaction.
All along, Fissiha’s face continued to swell. He lost the ability to speak, hear or see: his eyes became swollen shut. Soon, he could only communicate by writing on a piece of paper. The swelling didn’t start to subside until about a month later.
By the time we met Fissiha, his hearing and speech had gradually returned, though he slurs his words slightly. He does not have his sight back. As we sit with him, he points to the crown of his head, saying that when he touches it, his face begins to tingle. The sensation ceases immediately when he stops touching the top of his head.
He experiences pain on the right, back side of his head and says his forehead hurts as well. He says the pain has been worse in the last three months (that’s six months after the initial problem).
He pointed out to us that he has no memory loss and retains his sense of smell. He also said that at different times he’s been able to see shadows or changes in light that appear like flashes in his dark world.
He said they give him hope.
This is the most detail we could gather in a short period of time from Fissiha. He has been to several specialists and still can’t get a diagnosis or effective treatment for his condition.
charity: water founder and CEO Scott Harrison has spent the last week in the field working on the upcoming 2011 September Campaign. We’ll launch the campaign in late August and celebrate our five-year anniversary on September 7. In the mean time, here’s a quick update on his time with our local partners in Ethiopia:
Hi, friends —
I’m writing from a town called Hawzien in the Tigray region of Northern Ethiopia. It’s my 15th visit to Ethiopia in four years, and it’s probably my favorite country that charity: water works in. We’ve spent the last week in the field with A Glimmer of Hope (our country partner for Ethiopia) and specifically with our local implementing partner in Tigray, an organization called REST (Relief Society of Tigray). Together with your help, we’ve been making incredible progress here.
REST is now 32 years old, and is still led by its co-founder Tekloine, who is considered a hero in these parts; a man for the people. During the famine in the late 1980s, he helped march 160,000 Tigrayan people to Sudan and feed them. After the communist regime was overthrown, he convinced many of the freedom fighters to turn swords into plowshares and help him bring the people out of extreme poverty.
When I first came up here on a visit in 2008, I saw an incredible opportunity to go deep in Tigray — to move the needle towards total water coverage. All the key components seemed to be in place: a visionary leader we could trust, an organization with skilled national staff, high integrity, strong fiduciary controls and finally, a rural population in extreme need of clean water. REST was also brimming with intangible qualities like heart, grit, dedication and pure motivation. They hadn’t yet done the kind of individual project reporting charity: water requires of our partners (completion photos + GPS coordinates of every project), but were eager to learn and deliver.
If you’ve been following our work in the last four years, you’ve seen and heard plenty of the stories we’ve brought home from Ethiopia.
You’ve seen muddy water holes and you’ve listened to women talk about five-hour back-breaking trips for dirty water. You’ve seen leeches in contaminated open springs and heard about hyena attacks at night as the women and children fetch water from great distances.
But most importantly, you’ve been a part of the solution here. You funded more than 1,000 hand-dug wells, deep drilled wells, spring protections and rainwater harvesting systems, and you helped more than 370,000 people here get access to life’s most basic need.
In 2008, REST had 103 people working in their Water Programs.
Today, they have 216 people.
In 2007, REST built 257 total water projects.
This year, they’ll build more than 750 with
charity: water funds alone.
In 2007, the total clean water coverage in Tigray was 33%.
Today, it’s 49%.
In the last four years, you’ve funded over 1,000 water projects with REST that will serve more than 374,000 people with clean water.
It’s an important achievement in a short time, and it’s all because of your generosity. Stay tuned — we have some very exciting plans for Tigray and a big announcement coming this fall.
You have probably heard us say, Tweet or write: $20 can provide clean and safe drinking water to one person for 20 years. In the past few weeks, we’ve removed the “20 years” part from this message. We want to take a minute to explain how we arrived at this number in the first place and why we’re changing it.
The simple math: $20 is the average cost per person to build a charity: water project. That includes funds for sanitation, hygiene training and our partners’ existing maintenance models.
The technologies we fund depend on the region, the local culture and the program of our local implementing partner. Construction in some places can be relatively cheap; in others, even getting out to the project site in the first place costs a fortune. Here’s the breakdown of the average costs per country we work in, to give you an idea of just how much the cost of building a project can vary from program to program:
Four years ago, the accepted average lifespan of many of our water technologies was 20 years. Since then, charity: water — and the water sector as a whole — has been reevaluating what “sustainability” really means. We’ve always known that $20 per person covers the implementation of the water project on the ground. But we’re now unclear about how much it will cost to maintain our water projects over time; so we don’t want to continue to tell you (and ask you to tell your friends and supporters) that $20 can cover the cost of water for one person for 20 years.
A $20 donation can still give one person access to safe water, since it pays for construction of the project. But keeping the project running over the next 20 years could cost more. This all depends on what maintenance model works best and how (and when) the community fully takes ownership of their project. For now, we’ve eliminated the “20 years” portion of our messaging. We don’t want to promise that a project will last that long on its own. As we determine the cost of project maintenance over time, please know that your $20 still averages out to helping one person gain access to safe water through the construction of a project. We just have yet to know how much that project will continue to cost over decades of time.
For each charity: water project we fund, from drilled wells to household BioSand filters, we work with our local partner to include some sort of maintenance component. Just like the cost of building projects, this also varies; in some countries, we form and support local Water Committees to look after the projects. In others, we fund training for individual families to learn how to repair their projects.
We’re also dedicated to innovation in water project sustainability. The water sector as a whole is shifting its focus from the number of projects built to the longevity of these water sources. It’s an exciting time; new opportunities that have come up in just the last few years have potential to drastically increase accountability for water projects and monitor their sustainability.
We’re already piloting or supporting new systems to oversee our projects in the field. Here are a few examples:
Public-Private Partnerships in India.
We’ve supported the establishment of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Centers in two urban districts of India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The program trains local youth and women to repair and maintain hand pumps. This provides jobs, ensures a repair option for locals and best of all — the center is a business, so it sustains itself. The PPP centers serve as demonstration sites, whose best practices can then be replicated by local government, with our partners indirect involvement and support.
Field Level Operations Watch (FLOW) with Water for People.
One of our implementing partners, Water for People, has created an innovative visual data system to make managing projects more transparent and reliable. They upload data — GPS coordinates, populations served, state of the water project — from the field on mobile devices (usually smart phones). This data is then available online for anyone to assess the status of projects. Since we already prove every charity: water project using GPS and photos, we’re hoping FLOW helps us get more information on our projects and get it faster, too.
Clustering in rural Ethiopia.
Monitoring projects in remote areas is very challenging. Our local partners in Ethiopia have adapted by “clustering” many of their charity: water projects to concentrated areas. This makes gathering data easier, as it’s all in one place. It also fosters region-wide accountability; communities learn best practices from others who are taking care of their projects.
We believe in transparency. Whether you’re a long-time supporter or just now hearing about us, we want you to know how we’re fighting the water crisis. Here’s a quick list of other places to learn the specifics of our work; who we’re helping, what technologies we’re using, how we use 100% of donations to fund water projects and more:
Founder Scott Harrison has spent the last two weeks in Ethiopia with 19 donors and influencers in the field. They’ve visited communities without water, wells under construction and many completed water projects. He’s been going non-stop and is, needless to say, exhausted. He sent us an update yesterday:
Hi, all.
Since you last heard from me I:
Got food poisoning.
Took Cipro.
Drove to Adwa.
Drove to Aksum.
Drove to Hawzien.
Drove to the West.
Drove to the South.
Drove back to Mekele.
Drove to Hawzien.
Drove to Adwa.
Drove to Shire.
Do you remember our 7+ hour drive from Gondor to Shire? Remember how were supposed to see two villages that day but we were late coming into town because the drivers couldn’t find gas in the morning?
Be glad.
I finally made it BACK to Shire today. Got out of car. Walked a bit. Came to top of cliff. Gitachew [head of water projects for our partner organization] pointed down into the valley and said, “The wells are there.”
Anyway, once we reached the wells in the valley, I was glad we made the walk. It’s really dry and the communities were so grateful for the clean water.
Walking down was pretty easy compared to walking back up. Gebre [another local staff member] and I worked it out and decided that we climbed about 85 flights of stairs. In hot sun. With kids running ahead taunting us as we panted and choked for air.
Hope you’re all sipping chai lattes.
In three years, charity: water has funded more than 1,000 projects in Ethiopia, serving 455,000 people.
Scott will be in Ethiopia for another week, then he heads to Central African Republic to begin filming for this year’s September campaign. Stay tuned.
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