Helping ‘WASH’ away unsanitary conditions

Africa and clean water sources were the themes that tied together Woodmere Middle School’s community book club meeting on Dec. 1, which was attended by about 50 students, parents and educators who discussed “A Long Walk to Water” by Linda Sue Park and were visited by a representative from the nonprofit The Water Trust.
The community book club has met once per school year at the middle school for the past three years. The goal has always been to build community relationships through shared reading experiences, according to Joyce Bisso, the district’s superintendent.
“Book clubs are about experiences and the relationships that communities build for understanding, and that is the ultimate goal,” she said. “It’s parents reading with their children. Reading, and engaging in reading, are the essential skills.”
To help the students connect the material they read with a real-life experience, the district invited Jeff Kramer, Hewlett resident and co-founder of The Water Trust, to share his experiences at the book club gathering.
The nonprofit organization works primarily in Uganda, helping villages obtain clean water by building wells and installing latrines. Based in New York and Africa, they also raise the needed to prepare the villages to become sanitary and gain access to clean water. “One of my partners at my firm was ‘tired of being a Wall Street idiot’ and wanted to entrench himself in something new,” Kramer said. “He knew that I was interested in global poverty and had experience in nonprofit, so he asked if I wanted to do it with him.”

The Water Trust operates on a model known as WASH, Water And Sanitation (infrastructure and) Hygiene (education). Each village that wants to participate in this program must be inspected by the organization before building any wells. It costs about $7,500 for a well to be built in Uganda. “First, we go to each community,” he said. “Are they washing their hands and using latrines? If not, we give them the tools necessary to prepare for building the well.” The process takes about three weeks if a village is prepared to install a well, and up to about six months if a village needs preparation.
Individual or group monetary donations are welcomed, Kaplan said, and people could also volunteer their time and brawn, and join the Board of Directors if they have specific skill sets that would be a fit for the organization. One student who was excited about the opportunity to help people in Uganda was Naya Tauil, a sixth-grader from Woodmere.
“The lesson I learned from the book and the speaker is to be thankful for what you have,” she said. “Lots of other people in other places throughout the world don’t have a lot, and we should remember that. I just feel good about people being happy because they have clean water. Everyone should be able to have the love and support of people coming to help them.”
To financially sponsor a project and be connected to a specific site visit http://watertrust.org/index.php?s=kramer.
“We are all equal and nobody should live without the basics of life just because they were unlucky enough to be born into poverty,” Kaplan said.