The Water To Thrive team has had a full day in Ethiopia.

The W2T team traveling Ethiopia this time arrived on time in Addis Ababa on Monday October 3^rd with Rennie and Ed Scharlau and Jim Sorensen coming from Austin and Dick Moeller arriving from London.

After a good night’s sleep, our morning started early, leaving the Beer Garden Hotel with members of the Glimmer office in Addis.  We headed southwest out of Addis for Gedamba, about an hour’s drive away.  This was a very special visit to Gedamba as all the construction had been completed and water is flowing to three communities (Gedamba, Kajima, and Migira) with over 8,000 beneficiaries from 11 water points.  The project has been built to serve over 15,000 as the Gedamba area is experiencing rapid growth. 

We had a busy day visiting 5 of 6 community water points dedicated to W2T sponsors for Gedamba as well as the borehole, generator/pump house and the 100,000 liter reservoir. While some of us walk to the top of the hill to see the reservoir and visit the Migira community, Rennie and Jim were able to visit a nearby farmhouse to experience their family life briefly and saw the woman of the household preparing injera from their home grown grain, teff.

 It was an incredible, uplifting experience to share the joy of clean, safe water with the communities and to hear their stories of how access to clean water was already impacting their lives.  The visit to the Migira School was especially uplifting as about three hundred students (grade 1-4) lined the pathway to the water point…..singing, clapping and presenting us with flowers.  The school has never had access to water and now the water point is less than 100 yards from the school’s front door!  It was a great joy for all of us to see the kids enjoying the water.

We departed the Gedamba area about 3:00 pm headed a short distance to the Sebata Awash area.  We stopped along the way to enjoy some of the delicious Ethiopian coffee in order to regain our energy! W2T currently has 10 projects under construction in this area.  We visited the completed shallow bore hole project at the community of Kantalo.  Community members here have been enjoying the benefits of clean water for over 3 months.  We were able to visit with community members using water from the site, who expressed their gratitude for the blessing of clean water.

Also, this was a special day because the 4 Water to Thrive Board members, Ed Scharlau, Jim Sorensen, Eric Schmidhauser and Dick Moeller, were all together for the full day to experience the visits to the communities and the water points.  It reminded us all of how grateful we are to all those that contribute to our mission in so many ways, donors, volunteers, staff, implementing partners and many more.  It is truly an honor and blessing to represent everyone’s effort when we celebrate with the communities and share in their joy.

Tomorrow we catch an early morning flight to Gondar, near Lake Tana.  In this area we will visit water projects that are underway as well as prospective communities for projects later this year and in 2011.

Dick Moeller