| Welcome to the first News and Notes of 2020. This year we are celebrating 10 years and over 300 projects helping marginalized and disadvantaged people around the world create health, prosperity and a better future. During the year we will take a look back at some of the great changes you helped bring to life, show how we are growing to meet the demands of a changing world, and share more voices directly from the communities you help transform.
In this months issue we introduce the Friendly Platform, share how the small act of washing hands can change lives, check-in on a recent training in Minova that brought water security to two schools, hear from an HIV-positive partner who finally feels like a valued member of the society in which he lives, and remind you to save the date for our World Water Day celebration. As always, these efforts couldn't happen without incredible supporters like you.
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| | | Last month we showed how to turn bricks into clean water. We didn’t introduce it at the time, but it was the first article in a series about our Friendly platform. This month we are going to talk about another element of that platform, using soap making to advance hand hygiene and community health. But first, what is our platform and why should it be important to you?
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| | Our platform starts with clean water. It’s the greatest need for so many marginalized and disadvantaged people around the world. But over the years we have discovered that these people are usually denied more than one advantage, right and opportunity. They are denied and excluded from building the foundation of their own future. Such people are missing not just clean water, but most to all of the basic building blocks for technologically developed households and communities. So what can we do about that? That’s where the platform comes in.
We think of our platform as something people can build, stand on and share - together. It has several goals that form an integrated and systematic approach to better health, prosperity and self-reliance. Goals like clean water, safe cooking and adequate shelter for all. The goals are pursued using one or more technologies combined with active community engagement and your support.
Each technology we use is low cost, low tech and local. They are sustainable and community-appropriate. Technologies like BioSand Water Filters, rocket stoves and soap making don’t just change health outcomes by reducing disease and sickness. Together, they change lives and they change living.
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One of the often missing ingredients to better community health is soap. It may be surprising to hear, but hand-washing is not a custom or habit in every culture. And that can lead to deadly consequences especially as climate, population and forced-migration creates groundwater that is more polluted and disease epidemics more widespread. The need is most acute, no surprise, in disadvantaged communities with few physical advantages or resources.
For instance, Eastern Congo is struggling through the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history, with over 3,000 cases of the virus reported in 2019. Last year in the same area Measles killed 4,000 people, 90% of them children under the age of 5. And in the country as a whole, 5 million Congolese are at risk of being exposed to Cholera, a waterborne disease.
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| | Soap making or saponification is a relatively simple process. When you combine triglycerides (a fat or an oil - though we avoid Palm-based vegetable oil) with lye (obtained by running water through wood ash) a reaction occurs to create soap molecules. Our recipes are then supplemented with other detergents or surfactants and combined with color and/or fragrance, based on local preferences. Most of the soap we make is liquid, but the same process can be used to create bar soap. |
| The simple act of washing hands is the gateway to better health. It's the best prevention for contact-spread diseases like Ebola, and it helps tackle Measles and Cholera. For clean hands, you need clean water and you need soap.
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| | One group making and distributing soap right in the middle of these outbreaks in Eastern Congo is our long-term partner, CPGRBC. They are based in Goma and through one of our projects recently trained 20 staff in soap making. The staff then made over 300 liters of soap and distributed it to schools and orphanages in the middle of the Ebola outbreak. That's a lot of children who have a better chance at good health today than they had yesterday.
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| | | | | | | | While we are talking about the Democratic Republic of Congo, we should share the progress of a recent train-the-trainer multi-tech project held in Minova. Minova is located on the N2 (National Road 2), a major corridor that is a catalyst to spread both epidemics and militia bent on armed violence and banditry. Insecurity is so prevalent that in the last several months major organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières have withdrawn even as the need expands.
As is frequently the case, Friendly and our partners travel the roads others don't. In Minova, we had already conducted trainings in the production of BioSand Water Filters. In the Fall we expanded the impact with a multi-tech project to both benefit the community and enhance the skills of our local implementation partners. A multi-tech project is our primary method of building the Friendly platform. We engage and partner with a community to share, build and install multiple technologies.
In this project, we shared several technologies including permagardens, toilets, water catchments and brick-making with five different groups. Following the events, one of our local implementation partners, Aristotle Mbairwe, expanded the program to other community members. 50 households were trained to install a garden and the results so far appear very promising.
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| | Below you can see the trainers building a water catchment to support a school captured in the background. This will have a big impact on their water security. It's always a team approach, with everyone joining to advance their community.
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| | | The brick-making attracted even more interest with more than 70 local participants trained in the technology, including local village chiefs and women of solidarity groups.
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| | | | There are now requests for additional brick-making machines to support the extended group population of 30,000. It's remarkable how much can be accomplished in such a short period of time. All thanks to you. Every gift you make for $1500 buys one brick-making machine that can create hundreds of bricks a day for years to come.
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| | | The Friendly Water for the World board meeting is open to the public.
We next meet at Olympia Friends Meeting House, 3201 Boston Harbor Rd NE, Olympia WA on Tuesday, January 21, 4:30pm. Please visit us. All are welcome.
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| | | If you look through the Minova pictures above, you'll see a rainwater catchment tank being built by two masons. Many of our tanks, like that one, are constructed with help from the Uzima Centre. The center is a beacon of hope for more than 300 children and adults living with HIV, orphans and other vulnerable children.
Based in Ilemela, Tanzania, it has been an area and community beset by waterborne diseases. In 2015 Friendly first trained 42 members of the community there to make BioSand Water Filters. It was a great success and we later followed with a number of projects including training Uzima Centre members to build water catchments.
One of the trainees was John Mishana, shown first from the left in the picture below. He recently shared his story with us and we thought you should also hear it. We are his biggest fans, and we're sure you will be too.
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| | "Am 38 years old and father of 7 children. I and my wife have been affected by HIV for 13 years. Before I attend the training of BioSand Water Filters held at Uzima Centre few years ago our life was full of sorrow, full of amoeba, full of diarrhea and full of typhoid. The life was so tough because we were discriminated all around the community making our life so hard because both me and my wife are not educated and jobless.
I’m happy to be trained in the BioSand Water Filter fabrication, installation and maintenance because that training lighted our life. My family got a filter and all the water illness became a past story. I and my wife start fabricating filters to the other people in the community that makes us earn cash. The filter ends discrimination around my community because it makes us socialize with them and good enough my neighbors who were not able to afford to buy filter they came to my home and get a filtered water.
My story didn’t end there, when our group received the training on ferrocement rainwater
catchment, I decide to be a mason. My decision was good because I got the knowledge that
makes me educated and earn enough money to full my family with enough food and pay for school fees for my two youngest boys.
I am extremely good and happy to meet Friendly Water in my life. I‘m still John. Yes, I’m living with HIV, but I’m still the exact same person. The people around see me and touch me and look for the work that I am doing making community have access to safe and clean water through the Friendly Water."
-- John Mishana
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| | | Create a gift of clean water that travels across the world!
As we expand our program to impact more people and communities, you may be interested in supporting this work through planned gift options that leave a legacy. These options allow you to take care of your own family first, but also save for the future, benefit from tax deductions and create a lasting gift.
You can join those who are creating generational change through these programs:
- Employer matching
- Donor advised fund
- IRA Qualified Charitable distribution
- Stock contribution
- Estate gift
Friendly is part of matching gift programs at Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Google, Boeing and others. If you have an employer that has a matching gift program, please help us become part of their system.
We hope you'll contact us so we can share how easy it is to create these gifts and the big difference they make.
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| | | | | FRIENDLY WATER FOR THE WORLD |
| 1421 West Bay Drive NW Olympia WA 98502 U.S.A. |
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