One of the things that interested me in Ethiopia was the way that they built there houses. It seemed that almost every house had a door filled with rocks and many had a window filled with rocks. In Ethiopia one builds as one has resources. You start with a single room with a window, a front door and a side door. You fill the window and second door with rocks. When you can afford shutters you take the rocks out and install them in the window. When you can you build a second room connected by the side door. This room also has a front door and windowed filled with rocks. And so it goes. In the country I didn’t see any homes that appeared bigger than two rooms and they all seemed to preserve the ability to be re-divided.
I went to Ethiopia, in part, to find reasons not to believe. To learn that clean and safe drinking water isn’t such a big deal, that the solutions aren’t that easy or that the people aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities. In that endeavor I failed. Everyone has access to some form of water, but it is a consuming task to fetch it and a hazard to drink it. The solutions aren’t quite as simple as we’d like to imagine, but they aren’t very complex either. Finally, as I learned in the first village that we visited the people were very appreciative. They were grateful for the opportunity to come, every day, perhaps twice a day to wait in line to use a hand pump to fill a five-gallon plastic gas can with all the water their family would use that day. In that village donors provided a lifetime of water for each person for less than the price of a happy meal.
I’d like to think that the work that charity:water is doing is like the building of a house in Ethiopia. We are providing the means to build the first room that gives them the most basic shelter. It is up to them to make the most of that. To install shutters and add a room. It is implausible to us that a whole family would live in 150 square feet with no bathroom. It is implausible to us that a whole family would live on less than 10 gallons of water a day. However, for the people I met and over a billion others those implausibilities represent progress. It is implausible to me that I wouldn’t try to help.
If you feel the same way, please visit my birthday page (here) to donate or the charity:water site (here) to help.
3 comments:
shawn, we read all of it...and we both cried. Thank you for doing this. We are very proud of you. J & N
Hi Shawn, as you might imagine, I laughed and cried reading this. Your words and pictures give us much to ponder but, more importantly, also show there's obviously so much more we can all DO. Thank you for bringing us along with you on this journey, and for making a difference.
Shawn. Give me 10 birr!
Great insights, so glad you took the time to put all this down!
Scott
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