Friendly Water for the World December 2021 newsletter

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World December 2021 newsletter

December 2021 Issue

Dear neighbors,

In a year where we’ve never been so far apart, we find ourselves blessed and fortunate to have never been closer to you. Whether you are Binyamin from Lucknow, Judi from Bedford, Getry from Matsakha, Lisa from Yelm, Heather from

Simwatachela, Don & Chris from Keizer, Ajmat from Umaria, or Steve & Kristin from Seattle, we thank you for being our neighbors.

Our primary goal, which is often lost in the details of our work, is to bring people together as brothers and sisters, neighbors, and, most of all, as friends. Because we know that when we come together in sincerity and fellowship it’s impossible to leave anyone behind.

With your sweat and support combined with the hope for a better future and the ambition to see it through, we have had a remarkable year. So, wherever you call home, we thank you and all of our neighbors for your kindness and your friendship.

Happy Holidays!

Working together,

Curt Andino

Executive Director

A Look Back On 2021

Before we talk about all of the progress we made this year, we should thank you for all of the progress we made last week during our first ever Build Week. We have never had so many people visit our website and almost 40 of you donated online during GivingTuesday and the rest of the week. Of course, it's not too late to give. Any donations received through our website or postmarked in the mail before midnight on December 31st will take advantage of 2021 tax savings.

What you contributed over the last two years helped us create a new model for change. This year we started using that model with our first program in Matsakha, Kenya. Last week we hosted a Community Engagement event in Kambiri, not too far from Matsakha, that drew 150 people from neighboring villages. In between these events, you helped us impact the lives of more people in one year than we ever have before.

2021 By The Numbers

Programs reached over 5,000 people
27,000 bricks pressed
8 rainwater catchment tanks built
6,000 liters of soap made and sold
2 new village community engagements
1 new soap certification
1 new government-approved tank design
Water for 2,100 school students

The numbers really only tell half the story. What isn't captured here is the relationships we have nurtured, the trust we have built with communities, the social proof we have created, the awareness we have sparked with local and regional governments, and the validation we have achieved from our new process of investing in communities.

How it began

The story of the past year starts in Kakamega County, Kenya with a Matsakha community-led Good Hygiene program. It's one we have already talked about a lot in our newsletters. But what is especially noteworthy now is that the program is active and thriving. It is approaching one year of continued, and verified operations. Operations led entirely by our community partner, Matsakha Development Group. They produce and sell soap to their neighbors and friends. Their community has bought almost 7,000 liters of Meta soap which is now being sold in stores, to churches, and to schools.

With our first program in Matsakha starting to scale, we then launched a Building Better program with MDG. We purchased two Interlocking Stabilized Soil Brick machines for the community and trained several of the MDG members on how to use them. The MDG team has been hard at work testing soil, pressing over 20,000 curved bricks, and curing them at the schools where they are going to be used in rainwater catchment tanks.

Building a Build Center

In parallel to this work happening in Matsakha, we officially opened a Build Center in nearby Kambiri. Kambiri is home to Eric and Ezra, our Programs staff in Kenya. This center gives us not just a physical location and place to test technology, but a structure to share information and best practices between villages and communities.

Eric and his team have pressed over 10,000 bricks. We've successfully built and run a brick-making program, learned about different kinds of murram, created new soil mixtures, performed press maintenance, and discovered how environmental factors influence brick-curing. Bricks made through our Build Center now form a new kitchen, a schoolhouse extension, and toilets at both an orphanage and a Friends Meeting hall.

1,000,000 liter Water Security program

Without question, the largest program we launched this year was to build 50 rainwater catchment tanks at schools in Matsakha (with a few in Kambiri). These tanks will store over 1,000,000 liters of water for school children and the surrounding community. They are also built in an entirely new way. We partnered with our Kenyan-based engineering partner Makiga to design the tanks using curved interlocking stabilized soil bricks.

The first tank at Friends Shanderema Boys High School was recently completed, connected to gutters, and painted. Seven others have been constructed, most of them by the Matsakha team that our Kambiri staff trained. Each 25,000-liter curved-brick tank costs between $1,600 and $2,000. That's up to a 60% savings over the cost of commercial plastic tank water capacity. $600 of the tank cost is labor. This is labor that is now generating an income for the local masons. That means these tanks not only have positive health and social outcomes, but they have a direct economic benefit for the people of Matsakha.

New programs in Zambia

As you can tell from the background of this Munamoomba picture, Southern Zambia is a very different place from Western Kenya. This was recently a drought-stricken region that had to import food from the World Health Organization for the first time in 20 years. Rains have become unpredictable and frequently arrive in a downpour. We first started working here in partnership with Zambia Women and Girls Foundation (ZaWGF), early in 2019. Now, we are starting a new Munamoomba Build with their help.

During a three-day Community Engagement event we hosted with ZaWGF in Munamoomba, Zambia a few weeks ago, we met goat keepers and poultry farmers, headmen and tree planters. We discovered that the community is in serious need of clean, reliable water, as their primary source dried up and the remaining dammed water is dirty. The villagers told us that they have land, labor, skills, and equipment to start building a new path forward. With your help, next year we will start building multiple programs with the community as we expand the impact of our Zambia-based Monze Build Center.

Kambiri comes together

In early November, our Kambiri Build work started with a meeting between assistant chiefs and local community administrators from Ivakale, Bulovi, Shanderema, and Makuchi. They not only created and endorsed a plan of action, but they also encouraged their friends and neighbors to participate in our Community Engagement event.

Their leadership was so influential that representatives from every one of the 19 villages attended our event. They joined us for a full day of meetings, presentations, discussions, and some good tea and mandazi (donuts). During one section of the day, they told us what could make their community better:

Have team work and unity as a community
Being transparent and honest
Empower and capacity build communities through groups
Have health related issues addressed to avoid diseases
Have a more open and transparent ways of choosing project leaders
Every village to have a water tank
Security should always be beefed up in our community
Better education for our community
Have an improvement on sports and culture
We need to have a forest conservation program

This sounds like the kind of list that any group of neighbors would want for their community. Next week this team will join forces again to design what their future should look like. We will be beside them for every step.

2021 was a year that we embraced community - community surveys, community engagement, and community investment. Years of practice demonstrated to us that communities must lead their own transformation. Village by village, we invest with people in these communities through training programs, start-up capital, and 24/7 support.

No one resource can unlock change, so we provide solutions to strengthen a whole village. A village where people use local assets and ingenuity to develop the basic building blocks for a better future.

In our next newsletter, you'll discover how you can help us scale this work in 2022, what new programs and technologies we are testing, and how we plan to expand our community of friends and neighbors in the years ahead.

In Brief

>> You can start building a school for $0.23.

>> In search of the perfect gift? Dedicate your donation and we'll send your chosen recipient a holiday card on your behalf. There's still time - don't wait.

>> Congratulations again to our co-founder and current board member, David Albert on winning a Jamnalal Bajaj award for promoting Gandhian values.

>> Our next board meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 14th at 4:30. Register here.

>> Write a review to promote our programs and help us stay top rated! If you appreciate our work, please let us know at https://greatnonprofits.org/.

>> Have a question or suggestion? Send an email to will@friendlywater.org.

Please share our work and invite others to join our mission.

FRIENDLY WATER FOR THE WORLD

We are on a mission to transform the villages of the world.

https://friendlywater.org

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World December 2021 newsletter