Area businesses bring water to Africa

By Matthew Bernat
Turley Publications Staff Writer

STURBRIDGE - Sometimes, solutions to problems a world away present themselves in our own backyard.
For one Sturbridge couple, the answer to an east African village’s drinking water plight arrived in the form of a simple home improvement.
So, it was when Carl and Judy Nielsen hired a Charlton company to install a well that they also stumbled upon a way to improve the lives of students at St. Kizito High School in the country of Uganda.
Both are involved with Growth Through Learning, a group dedicated to providing high school scholarships for east African girls. Attending high school is neither free nor government mandated in that region. For many girls, Mrs. Nielsen said, education leads to a better life.
As a board member of Growth Through Learning, a Massachusetts-based non-profit, she had visited St. Kizito High School a year before and saw firsthand the challenges that confronted students for lack of easy access to water.
Students at the school get their drinking water from a well dug into the base of a spring several hundred feet down a steep hillside. Local villagers use the well for drinking and cleaning water also.
Because of its age, the well often broke down forcing students to walk with five-gallon plastic jugs carrying water back to school.
“It was an old, old pump,” Mrs. Nielsen said. “It looked like something from Word War II.”
Though Growth Through Learning’s primary focus is to offer education opportunities, Mrs. Nielsen said the water problem was affecting students negatively.
The Nielsens identified the problem, but it was through the efforts of three area businesses that brought forth a solution – a new pump for the village.
The first business, Charlton Well, donated a pump worth $3,600 after Mr. Nielsen asked about getting one for the school as his home well was replaced. Mrs. Nielsen credited Joe Belanger, of Charlton Well, for acquiring and donating the pump.
To install the pump, Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen, along with Peter and Lynn Zukas of Zukas Hilltop Barn in Spencer traveled to Uganda for three weeks. Mrs. Nielsen noted the Zukas’s are strong supporters of Growth Through Learning. Also, Mr. Nielsen, who is president of the Worcester Elevator Company, used his expertise in mechanical engineering to properly install the pump. Mr. Nielsen and Mr. Zukas also taught villagers how to operate it.
Once it was in place the changes were apparent immediately. The school’s headmistress related the girls’ reaction. “There was thunderous clapping from them…They promise to study very hard now that they will not have to fetch water,” she wrote to Mrs. Nielsen.
Though providing clean, reliable sources of water is not part of the organization’s mission, this instance did offer a chance to improve the educations of the girls attending St. Kizito High School.
“Our focus will always be to raise funds for scholarships, but you never know when something else will stare you in the face,” Mrs. Nielsen said. In developing countries the two major obstacles to a better life are often finding clean water and an education.
“Those issues go hand-in-hand,” she said, noting it is not traditional for girls in that region to receive an education beyond primary school. Education improves lives, she said, and results in fewer instances of early childbirth, higher incomes and better health.
Another issue affecting villagers served by St. Kizito High School is healthcare. In January, Mrs. Nielsen toured the village, including the infirmary and saw the poor condition it was in. “They had almost nothing in way of supplies,” she said.
As a registered nurse, she said she understood what the lack of resources meant for those children suffering from malaria and other diseases.
“There’s an opportunity to make a child more comfortable,” she said. Though she couldn’t do anything to help immediately, the problem was filed away until an answer to the problem appears - whether in the form of volunteers, donations or some other manner – hopefully sooner rather than later.
For more information on Growth Through Learning, or to find out how to donate time or money, visit them on the web at: www.growththroughlearning.org, or call (781) 646-2446.