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Making a Lasting Impact

Students in the East Africa program at Pepperdine University partner with the Home Improvement Campaign in Uganda to promote community health and sanitation, teach the impact of deforestation, and help resolve the problem of access to clean, safe drinking water.

One of the greatest difficulties facing the poorest nations in the world has long been a lack of access to clean water for drinking, bathing, and cleaning, as well as a lack of practical education about how to keep water from being contaminated by outside sources that carry disease. More than 1 in 6 people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water, water related disease is responsible for 1 out of every 4 deaths of children under the age of 5, and nearly 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions. In Uganda alone, only about 60 percent of the populace has access to clean water, making uncontaminated water an enviable and much needed resource for many.

Tackling this difficulty has become one of the most impactful ways for non-governmental groups to successfully change a region's economic and health woes. Pepperdine University’s East Africa program partners with Kibo Group International to provide students with a vivid living example of what daily life is like for the communities in East Africa where a solution to the water problem requires far more than simply digging shallow wells and drilling boreholes.

"One of the things we learned in our time there was that digging wells by itself isn’t enough to eradicate the illnesses that come from contaminated water," says Gary Selby, Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication, who went with the students to Uganda and Rwanda the first two summers of the program. "Villagers also need to be introduced to sanitary toilet facilities, proper hand washing techniques, more hygienic dish drying racks, compost pits, etc."

The month long summer study program focuses on issues related to cross-cultural communication, global poverty, and economic development and immerses students in the world of East Africa, beginning in Jinja, Uganda, the famed source of the Nile River. Three weeks into their stay students leave Uganda on a two-day bus trip to Rwanda where they see the human impact of the genocide before going on safari. While in Jinja students spend their mornings and evenings like students throughout the world, but during the afternoons their educational experience takes a drastic turn toward giving back to the overall development of the community that so graciously hosts them.

Every afternoon during their learning experience students take service learning to the extreme, shadowing and working with groups to improve the human experience and enrich the lives of their fellows. Deeply impacted by the experiences that they had and the hospitality that the countries of East Africa showed them, students from the first two years of the program came back to the States wanting to continue their involvement in the development of Jinja and villages like it throughout East Africa.

"The service learning aspect of the East Africa program is absolutely still affecting me," says Nathan Kreis, who went on the trip in 2009. "The smiles of the children, the stories of the AIDS victims, and the devastating circumstances of the people with handicaps all left an emotional imprint on my heart, but the experience also had a much more practical impact. I hope to work in the nonprofit sector in the near future, so learning about the realities of the nonprofit work in East Africa will forever impact me."

Through their desire to stay involved with the people that they had lived among while abroad, students from the first two summer programs partnered with Selby to reconnect with Kibo International and raise approximately $1800 USD to support and fund three separate Home Improvement Projects. The projects provide practical village hygiene and sanitation throughout Uganda in connection with the Water Source project, Kibo’s partnership with local agencies, which digs shallow wells and drills deep boreholes for villages.

"The Home Improvement Campaign is a practical educational component to the Water Source that accompanies every well drilling/digging project," says Spencer Bogle, Pepperdine's contact within Jinja and Kibo. "Through the campaigns we try to raise the percentage of homes that have pit latrines, teach about hand washing and the building of hand-washing facilities using local materials, build energy efficient wood burning stoves for the reduction of fuel and deforestation, as well as help the community take long term responsibilities for the well and the overall health of the village. This is all done through the lens of the gospel as it shapes the church’s vision for development and service."

Like much of the undeveloped world, waste consistently pollutes common water sources and the majority of the Ugandan countryside has little practical access to running water for drinking or cleaning, or to education about practical village hygiene and sanitation. The Home Improvement Campaign first demands that villagers receive a practical education about village hygiene and sanitation to keep the water sources from becoming a contaminated source of water borne illness once again.

Demanding the support and involvement of the village prior to the introduction of new boreholes and shallow wells acts as a preventative education; while water borne illnesses make up a good portion of disease in East Africa, the plastering of huts, building of dish drying racks, and regular sweeping of the compound do more than instill a sense of pride in where the villagers live. As yet another part of the Home Improvement Campaign all of these actions help reduce the insect population living most immediately in the village and help keep the water sources clean, greatly increasing life expectancy in each village.

Students who participate in the East Africa program are making a lasting impact on the development of the region, contributing to the economic and physical improvement of countries that have faced the best and worst of conditions. To learn more about the East Africa program and other International programs at Seaver College, visit the website here.

By Samantha Troup