700 people have clean water!
January 5, 2012Water. A human right.
It never ceases to amaze me how much water changes people’s life. Especially in Laos, where the climate can be extremely hot and dry. While in the rural areas, it was nearly 90 degrees and unbelievably dry and dusty. Living in this environment for a few days will dehydrate you fast. And what is absolutely crazy is that rarely do the village children carry water bottles. In fact, I never saw it once. So what do they do, one might ask? Well from what we gathered, they come to school from 9am-12pm and then they walk to a river that is nearly 20 minutes away to drink. They then return to school, which is another 20 minutes and finish their school day from 2pm – 4pm. It is very normal for children to get sick from bacteria in the water or from not washing their hands after using the toilet.
Nine months ago, I met with MiiR Founder, Bryan Pape. While chatting with him, he informed me that a child’s brain does not develop properly without water. If a child’s brain is dehydrated, it cannot grow to be healthy or retain the knowledge that education books and supplies can aid. This simple understanding has propelled us to tackle education problems in Laos from a multidimensional angle, which encompasses supporting water projects and education resources. If a community doesn’t have water and they need it, we will co-invest in a water pump with them. The importance of co-investment is the foundation on which liveGLOCAL sits. Once a water pump is added to the school, teachers see improved attendance, healthy children, and an increased ability to study and learn.
Before I get ahead of myself, you might be wondering what “co-investment” means? Simply stated, co-investment is when both parties (the community and liveGLOCAL) bring money to solve the immediate education or clean water problem that they are facing.
It takes both need and an ability to co-invest for us to partner with a village. Without these two important requirements, we have found that books and resources are not taken care of and negative or dependent qualities are created. Communities if not properly managed can even waste or reject aid and aid opportunities. We do not work with communities that we feel do not take the education system seriously. Every village in Laos says that they need aid but few bring their own resources to the table to invest in their own children’s future. We look for at least a 15% co-investment when doing projects, which usually requires the village chief and community leaders to pool money by visiting the homes in the village to ask for donations.
The pump that you see in this video was our second successful co-investment project in Laos! The community managed the building of the pump, which included purchasing the concrete, fence materials, and building it. They paid about about 1,600,000 kip ~ $200 U.S. dollars. 
We paid 13,000,000 kip ~ $1600 U.S. dollars for the pump, so in this situation the community co-invested 12.5% of the final project costs.
For the four libraries that we built, we had to put a spin on our co-investment development strategy. In Laos, generally speaking, the elders have no relationship with story books or reading for pleasure. The lack of understanding the value of story books makes it a challenge to co-invest with them financially. They don’t grasp the understanding that a child’s imagination and learning grows when they get a thirst for knowledge and ideas. And observationally speaking, the children’s learning environment in these school’s is not that entertaining. We hope that these story books inspire the children to grow in their studies.
So whats the different spin? Our co-investment strategy for the libraries requires each school that we work with to provide a safe holding case for the books. This ensures that they will be locked up when school is not in session, which prevents them from being stolen or misplaced. Each of the four schools that we built libraries in have provided safe-keeping (lockable book cases) for the books. We are extremely excited about how well the teachers received our resources.
Thank you for following and supporting our Christmas and New Years trip to Laos to build four libraries for 400 children, and provide a water pump for 150 children and 700 people in the Houy Chorte village!
We will sum up the trip in a last post in a few days…
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