SPRINGFIELD – The projects in Nano were started well before I was involved in Rotary or any kind of humanitarian work.
It all began with a sanitarian named Ron Baker sitting in his home in Roseburg, Ore., watching TV. A news report covering a refugee camp in Cambodia stated that tens of people are dying each day, and doctors were unable to stem the tide. He turned to his wife and said: “I can stop that.”
Baker received a leave-of-absence from the State of Oregon DEQ, bought a ticket, and headed to Cambodia. He found his way to the refugee camp that was in the news program and, unannounced, walked into camp and told them he was there to stop the dying. The people in charge of the camp were so at wits end they let him loose to try.
Within a few months he had the death rate down to only a few per month.
He applied a simple public-health principle: Separate the sick and their waste products from the healthy.
He organized the refugees to dig latrines away from the stream where they were getting water. The latrines would help control flies, which land on waste from sick people, and then land on healthy people’s food.
This worked because the main killer at the camp was cholera – which is highly contagious and a person can get it repeatedly. It can kill within hours. Contain human waste, contain the disease.
Toughing it out
While in Cambodia Ron lived through a bandit attack on a bus, where he counter-attacked the machete-wielding bandits. He has scars as testimony to the incident.
Baker went on to perform humanitarian rescues of refugees around the world – in Sudan, Rwanda/Congo, Thailand, Brazil, and others. He started a nonprofit, Public Health International (PHI), which sends sanitarians (at their own expense) to places around the world to teach/train public-health sanitation. It saves countless lives. Doctors treat illness, but sanitarians and public-health practices prevent the most common contagious killers.
Over time PHI began to work with villagers in various places to bring their communities into compliance with public-health principles. One of the participants in PHI had a wife that was from the Santa Elena peninsula of Ecuador. There, the villages had about a 20% death rate in children from birth to 5 years old. Again the main culprit was cholera, which was so endemic that hospitals in the area had cholera wards with 10 to 20 beds, constantly with patients.
With a grant from Rotary, called a 3H Grant (Health, Hunger, Humanity), they attacked the problem in what was then a unique fashion. They set out to train locals to be sanitarians who could train others and teach villagers to understand public-health principles. They went to the villages over a region and constructed latrines (the first line of disease prevention), then they constructed wells and a central village water-delivery system (the second line of prevention), and they finally began a solid-waste collection and sanitary landfill program (the third line of prevention).
These measures set in place the primary methods to separate diseased and contaminated sources from the healthy. But these solutions are only as good as they are operated.
Teaching and training
More important than any infrastructure is teaching and training in public-health principles.
The sanitarians that were trained checked on people’s operation and upkeep of their latrines. They made sure the water systems were being properly sanitized. The sanitarians oversaw chlorine production for sanitizing both public water systems and water in individuals homes. They oversaw the landfill operations. They taught the importance of controlling open water sources to keep mosquitoes under control (malaria and dengue fever control).
When the project started a meeting was held telling the leaders of all of the 26 villages in the area that there would not be any money for the villages, but if they participated they would see fewer children die. A number of villagers walked out at that point.
For the villagers who stayed in the program, the death rate of children in their villages dropped from near 20% to under 3% within six months of full implementation.
Every hospital began to shut down its cholera wards, and the villagers who had walked out had walked back in.
The trained sanitarians from Ecuador decided that what they had accomplished in their area was worth sharing with others.
They hosted a seminar for all who wished to learn – expecting about 20-30 people. More than 80 showed up – including representatives from international groups.
“How did you do it, with so little resources?” they asked. They were told how it was done with locals training, inspecting, teaching, and supervising.
From this background, Baker came to me and asked if I would be willing to go to Ecuador to look at a groundwater issue. I agreed to go. The specifics are too complex to dive into here, but involved the seasonality of the rainfall, the natural fluctuations in rainfall amounts, and intensity from year to year, deforestation, erosion, and shallow groundwater reservoir depletion.
While on this intense volunteer trip, I heard about many of the things Baker and PHI had done as listed above. I looked at the villagers there in Ecuador and could see that 20% of the children I was looking at would not be there were it not for PHI, Ron Baker, and Rotary.
I knew right then that this was something I wanted to be involved in. Saving lives, not in the abstract, but in reality, was truly appealing. I can truly look at the people in my Rotary Club and tell them, “You have saved lives already, and you will save hundreds over time by what you have done in Nano, Togo.”
After a trip to Nicaragua to help evaluate a sanitary landfill site, I joined Rotary.
