10 years ago, Quakers helped start a movement

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Subject: 10 years ago, Quakers helped start a movement

Dear Friends,

We are all living through unprecedented times! So, I want to begin by sharing our hopes for your families and friends that, together, most of us will be able to get through this and rebuild our communities. And as I am reminding my friends and neighbors all of the time, wash your hands with soap and water, and remember that there are so many of our brothers and sisters around the world who don’t have access to soap and water. In Kurundi (the language of Burundi), we say “Turikumwe!” – we are all together!

2020 marks Friendly Water for the World’s 10^th Anniversary. We want to take this opportunity to reflect a little bit of where we have been, and, with your help, where we hope to be headed. And we wish to thank so many of you for your support over our first decade.

We were founded in 2010 as a joint project of Olympic View Friends Church (Northwest Yearly Meeting) and Olympia Friends Meeting (North Pacific Yearly Meeting). While incorporated and filing a 501(c)(3) as a secular organization, we are committed to the Quaker Testimonies of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. Our bylaws require that four board positions be reserved for Friends.

From our inception, Friendly Water for the World has been committed to working with everyone of whatever race, religious persuasion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class or caste. However, we place a high priority on walking alongside those who are most marginalized, disadvantaged, and dispossessed. This often makes our efforts much more difficult, but it also makes our successes more gratifying. We work toward the uplift of entire communities, starting with the “last” person.

RÉPUBLIC DÉMOCRATIQUE DU CONGO

Our very first official project was with CPGRBC - Centre de Paix pour la Guérison et la Reconstruction des Bases Communautaires: RDC-the Peace Center for Healing and Reconstruction of Grassroots Communities in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Founded by Quaker social activist Zawadi Nikuze, CPGRBC began by assisting 200 women who had been sexually assaulted, and their children. These women and children were victims of the ongoing conflict in eastern Congo near the city of Goma, and who had no place to go. (More than seven million people have died in the ongoing conflict.) CPBRBC worked to provide them with trauma healing services, very basic housing and food, and vocational opportunities, literacy, and conflict resolution skills. They write,

“Our work is inspired by the principles of love, forgiveness, respect of human dignity, neutrality and transparency, dialogue and truth, patience, respect of diversity/differences in others, and nonviolence.”

CPGRBC has established 70 peace committees across the region, and has helped women set up agricultural projects and simple savings and loan associations. One of their staff people, Aristote Luba Mbairwe, doubles as a Friendly Water for the World trainer.

He has brought projects in BioSand Filter and rainwater catchment fabrication, production of non-fired soil-stabilized bricks, and soapmaking to communities. The work is difficult, as armed militias still attack the areas, and there are many displaced people. But still, they persevere some ten years later.

In India, Friendly Water for the World has held two training programs at the historic Friends Center at Rasulia, right in the center of the country. Programs were mounted with support from Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Asia-West Pacific Section. We have also worked on programs with Friends in Honduras and Bolivia.

MONZE, ZAMBIA

Friendly Water for the World’s African Program Manager is Eric Lung’aho Lijodi. He is the former clerk of Young Friends of Kenya, and clerk of Kakamega Friends Church. He has worked with Friends’ communities all over western Kenya, as well as in Tanzania.

Eric was recently in Zambia setting up clean water projects with the Zambia Women and Girls’ Foundation, supported by the Welsh Quaker group Friends of Monze. Their founder Deana Owen lived for a time in Monze. The Monze community has been experiencing extreme drought. Water tables are dry and food supplies are dwindling. Eric and a team of trainers from Tanzania just completed training the community in fabricating and distributing BioSand Water Filters, rainwater catchment systems, and the manufacture of non-fired soil-stabilized bricks.

Masons have been trained. A Friendly Water for the World Coach has been hired to monitor progress and to report on any problems that arise. The initial two catchments are attached to schools – there are five other schools that could use two 20,000-liter catchments each. Friends of Monze is now raising funds among Friends to extend the program by having the masons build them. But there’s more!

We have weekly online community video Chats every Friday from 12:00 - 1:00pm PST that you can join. It's a great way to make new friends from around the world.

SIMWATACHELA, ZAMBIA

In the coming months, we expect to expand our programming with at least three Quaker-related efforts, and hope you will consider supporting them (and us) as you are able.

Now that we have completed the training work at Monze, Zambia, and the teams there gain further experience, we hope to employ them in starting a project in a very rural area some two-hundred kilometers to the south, in a place called Simwatachela. The villages are very remote and are suffering greatly from both lack of clean water, and lack of water generally. Life expectancy is under 38.

The project is to be staffed locally by Heather Cumming and managed by Eric Lijodi. Heather was a Peace Corps volunteer in this area in 2003. After leaving the Peace Corps, she became a volunteer in Nepal. But the villagers collected all the money they could, and the village headman wrote her that they desperately needed her back and would pay for her airfare. She has been there ever since, more than 15 years, heading up the Simwatachela Sustainable Agriculture and Arts Program with her 10-year-old daughter Radiance.

The importance of this project is two-fold. First of all, the community of course needs clean water technologies and is ready and prepared to work, under the leadership of their traditional chief and headman. But just as importantly, we will be able to build upon the investments of Friends of Monze by having the newly trained individuals learn to become trainers themselves. Instead of “each one, teach one”, it will be “each community teach another community”.

Friendly Water for the World receives ongoing support from more than two dozen Quaker meetings and churches, from Yearly Meetings and Friends Organizations in Ireland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, and from hundreds of Friends from around the world. We are very, very grateful for your ongoing support.

BINGA, ZIMBABWE

And that will lead to yet another Quaker-related project! The American Friends Service Committee in Zimbabwe has long been in dialogue with us about leading another similar project in Binga, Zimbabwe, just across the Lake Kariba resorvoir from southern Zambia. The people of Binga were displaced from their ancestral homeland during the flooding of the reservoir, they speak the same language (Tonga) as the people across the border, (and Heather). Waterborne illness rates are, like much of East and Southern Africa, consistently high, and as rivers and surface water dry up (punctuated by short, intense periods of flooding), people are in desperate straits. Together with AFSC, we will strive to build a program that will not only deal with water-related problems, but result in income-generation in a cash poor economy.

This will take time of course, but if we can make this work in Simwatachela and Binga, we can imagine a string of programs from Tanzania to Zambia and Zimbabwe, initiated by Friends, which can help ensure both clean water and a move toward community self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world…

GUATEMALA

Friendly Water is working closely with members of Eugene (Oregon) Friends Meeting to develop a water and health-related program with Mayan people in the highlands of Guatemala. Members of Eugene Friends have long worked in Guatemala, and the AFSC staff person for Project Voice Immigrants Rights Program and his wife in Salem are both immigrants/refugees from the Mayan region.

We are now working on a community assessment in one particular area, where we have just completed a community survey that had to be translated from English to Spanish to one of the Mayan dialects. There are some things we already know: a combination of global climate change and land encroachments has made it increasingly difficult for much of the population to successfully engage in subsistence agriculture, and helps drive emigration toward the U.S.; water conditions are extremely poor, and waterborne illnesses are common; and, finally, the use of three-stone cooking fires inside homes has led to tens of thousands of childhood deaths from lower respiratory infections (and which could be alleviated with rocket stoves, a low-cost, low-tech and locally built technology that Friendly Water for the World can share.)

The local communities are pleading with us to come down as soon as possible, but we are doing our best to fully engage the community before then, take account of their own assets, and ensure that the program can be fully sustainable. And we are involving the members of Eugene Friends every step of the way, as well as our f(F)riends Joe and Jane Snyder of Progresa, the well-established Guatemala Friends Scholarship Program.

FINAL WORDS

So, this is what we have been up to, and what we hope to be as well. But we can’t do it without your help. The backbone of what we do is rooted in the compassion, empathy, and witness that have been the hallmarks of Quakerism since its inception. We hope you will join us in our efforts – through your monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings and churches, through peace/faith and social action committees, and through your families and friends.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, and if there is a special program or initiative you would like to support, please contact us, and we will try to do the needful.

My phone number is 360 918-3642; email is david@friendlywater.org, or you could also contact our Executive Director Curt Andino at 360 214-3145; curt@friendlywater.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

In the Light,

David H. Albert – Olympia (Washington) Friends Meeting, and Board Chair, Friendly Water for the World.

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Subject: 10 years ago, Quakers helped start a movement