The Amazing Work of the Father Fleming Foundation, by Tom Bichler

Click here to download a report on Vikas Deepti, the charitable organization in Orissa (now Odisha) that our Father Fleming Foundation helps support.  There is so much good work going on there, it is hard to imagine!  The efforts of Vikas Deepti lie mainly in education, rehabilitation, nutrition, health care, and support for three groups: Handicapped Children, Lepers, and other needy individuals in the Bargargh community of Odisha. The outreach program impacts over 3000 people!

 

Tom is planning a visit there in January, after which he will file another report report with us.

Mike Lipman's Wonderful Essays on South Asia Pure Water Initiative (Update #2)

October 2014

Dear Friends,

We are in the middle of our training camp in Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh at the Friends Rural Center, a Quaker retreat on 48 acres. About 40 of the acres are planted with rice, toor dal (lentil), maize that they use for cattle feed and vegetables. They have a dairy herd consisting of brahma cows, particularly hearty in the hot weather.

We have 61 participants representing 25 non-profit organizations who are interested in learning about the BioSand filter technology for their rural development projects. Contaminated water in rural India is a scourge that our filter can handle in a cost effective way. The trainees are taught the water cycle, ways to protect water sources, sanitation and hygiene, the science of the BioSand filter and construction of the filter and manufacturing of the molds. We also give guidance in planning and rolling out a clean water program using the filter. Our lead trainer, Suneel Ragavaram, is from the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST), a non-profit organization in Canada that is the world’s leader in BioSand filter technology science and engineering.

The participants have each made two filters with their own hands, a lesson they will never forget. This is a remarkable group, peppered with master degree graduates in rural development, scientists and engineers. They have completely grasped the concepts being taught and have participated fully in discussions and interactive learning sessions.

Last evening we were entertained by two trainee singers. The event turned out to be a variety show as the hidden talents of many of the trainees came to the surface. There were stories and jokes, lively songs were sung by the crowd and to top it off, one of the participants grabbed the guitar and began singing old Bob Dylan songs that brought the house down!

After the festivities, we enjoyed a delicious meal prepared by our chef and his staff in their outdoor kitchen adjacent to our three sided dining tent. The chef had cooked for the governor of the State and the meals are delicious and varied. It is a common practice in India to serve only vegetarian food at events like ours so as not to offend any vegetarians who participate.

The participants took a test on the last day and we presented them with their certificates, made emotional speeches and said good bye to our newly made friends and BioSand water filter family. They are now ready to start a BioSand filter program of their own and are qualified to teach others to do the same. We now have trained people in 25 of India’s 29 States and are positioned to begin rolling out this life saving technology throughout the country.

We were ready to leave the training site when a television crew showed up to interview us and learn about the filter. Once again we unpacked the demo filter and the PowerPoint presentation and submitted to the last of our press meets. We have had at least half a dozen newspaper and television interviews. We try to have our trainees contact the press whenever we make a site visit. We also invite local dignitaries, Rotary and Lions club members and rural development officers to meet us and learn about the filters. The press and other exposure does wonders for our trained organizations to raise awareness and support for their programs from local people.

After the interview four of us were driven to Bhopal, a three hour drive over bad roads and spent the night. An early morning flight brought two of us to New Delhi, our trainer; Suneel, flew to Hyderabad and Ramachandra, our Managing Director, to Bangalore.

Shivani and I met with the joint drinking water minister at the Central Government Complex in New Delhi, one of the top Indian officials who are involved with water issues in the country. The meeting ran late so we missed our last appointment of the day. On our way back to the airport late in the afternoon our taxi broke down near the airport. We take the prepaid taxis in New Delhi because they are one-half the rate of the newer air conditioned fleet. They are held together with bailing wire and tape but since the weather wasn’t steamy, it was fine. The vehicle broke a spring on the speed bumps leading to the airport and came to a loud and sudden halt. The driver hopped out, flagged down another taxi and we transferred the luggage and finished the journey. We flew to Bangalore and reached our hotel at midnight. That was a typical day in India, not an exceptional one!

I am leaving India without finishing our scheduled program. Exhaustion and a respiratory infection forced me to leave a few days early. Shivani and Ramachandra are flying to Pune, then driving to Mumbai and finally to New Delhi to finish our scheduled appointments with two fortune 100 (in India) corporate foundations, Rotary Clubs and dignitaries. Thanks team! This is the third time I am leaving India with a respiratory problem. The cities have immense problems with clean air and the countryside is dusty from the traffic running on the sides of the road that have unpaved shoulders. I am trying to avoid the bouts of pneumonia I have contracted in the past by resting and leaving early.

Despite the rigors of traveling in this country, the experience is gratifying, interesting, challenging and rewarding. I have met so many wonderful people and have seen parts of 7 Indian States on this trip, many for the first time. We have great momentum going forward and we all hope our hard work pays dividends in saving and changing lives by simply providing clean drinking water.

Mike

South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc. 11 Wadsworth Lane
Wallingford, CT 06492
USA 

 www.sapwii.org 

 See more photos by clicking here.

Mike Lipman's Wonderful Essays on South Asia Pure Water Initiative (Update #1)

September 30, 2014 Dear Friends,

I left the States on the 16th of September for India. It’s now the 30th and this is the first opportunity that allowed me 30 minutes to jot down some of the happenings with the BioSand water filter project.

Our team has been on hyper drive since our arrival. There have been dozens of meetings, site visits to our network of trained organizations, meetings with individuals and spiritual leaders, press conferences and interviews and village visits to see the BioSand filters in action and hear the testimony of the villagers. We have been in mountain villages in the Himalayas and steamy jungle villages in Mysore. Everywhere we go, the feedback we are getting from the filter users is extremely positive. The filters are making a great impact on people’s health and well-being.

Our team is led by Shivani Kumar, our India Country Representative. American born from LA she epitomizes our love of efficiency and technology. With the aid of her IPhone, she can do more on a two hour car ride than I can accomplish in two days! She has made up our itinerary and it’s fast-paced with little time for sleep and no time for leisure.

We are also traveling with RamaChandre Gowda, our managing director who has run our Kolar workshop for the past 9 years and has been instrumental in our success. We are also joined by Lalit Wadher, our newly appointed Director of Resource Management and Partnerships. Lalit is from Chhattisgarh, a State in Northern India famous for rice and mosquitos according to Lalit. Lalit is a retired banker who teaches finance and banking at the post-graduate level at private institution in Chhattisgarh.

Our team is focused on taking the BioSand filter technology country-wide by training organizations that already have rural development projects and are looking for a low cost and effective clean water technology. The government has been pushing reverse osmosis (RO) technology as the answer to the water contamination plaguing the country. However, RO has some drawbacks. Fundamentally, reverse osmosis is the process of pushing contaminated water under pressure through a very fine membrane to remove all the contaminants. The process requires large amounts of electricity to force the water through the membrane. In the rural areas, electricity is a scarce commodity and they have barely enough juice to pump water from bore wells for drinking and irrigation.

Another issue with reverse osmosis is that it wastes about 40 percent of the water that stays on the contaminated side of the membrane. The water goes “down the drain” as waste water from the process. The problem is that the contamination is concentrated in that waste water and further pollutes the ground water as it is flushed from the filter. RO does remove mineral contamination like fluoride which is highly concentrated in some areas of the country with deep bore wells and causes severe health problems, corroding teeth and bones. Our filter can use surface water instead of the mineral contaminated bore well water and avoid the fluoride problem altogether.

With all the work we are accomplishing, we keep our spirits up with good humor. Lalit loves to tell jokes like “I am the King of my household; (my wife gave me permission to say that!)” RamaChandre has an IPhone full of funny videos that he passes around for our amusement. We make fun of each other with due respect and tell stories of our lives and travels to pass the time while in the car.

Of course the most fun is to go into the villages. The villagers we meet are gracious and friendly, a bit shy and curious but willing to share their stories of heartache and joys. These are the people most affected by contaminated drinking water and are truly grateful for our efforts to solve this problem for them. That is the payoff of all our hard work and efforts. To save just one life and to improve just one person’s well- being makes all our inconveniences of the difficult travel vanish immediately.

Mike Lipman

South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc. 11 Wadsworth Lane
Wallingford, CT 06492 USA www.sapwii.org 

See more photos by clicking here.

Help Further Knowledge: Share your RPCV Experiences with Meghan Kallman, PhD Candidate from Brown University

My name is Meghan Kallman, and I am a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.  I am writing a dissertation about the relationship between organizations and social change work. I am interested in civic participation, the third sector, and development; in other words, what happens when people try to make their worlds better, and what do formal organizations have to do with that process?

I have elected to write my dissertation on the Peace Corps because I am interested in the effects of volunteering on people’s lives: how are volunteers’ biographies, identities, and politics shaped by participation? How do individual volunteers carry their Peace Corps experience with them throughout their lives and careers? How does this sort of international service experience permanently affect people?

As a part of it, I have created an online survey for RPCV's asking about their experiences abroad. To take the survey, please click here: https://brown.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0v3sObMYOUf8N0N

You should find the survey intuitive and enjoyable, and it should take about twenty minutes to complete. This research has been approved by the Brown University Institutional Review (ethics) Board and is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Please contact me at meghan_kallman@brown.edu should you have any questions.

Update on the Work of the South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc.

Mother and Children with Water Filter

Mike and Cathy have sent the following report on the fantastic work being doen by the South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc.:

February 10, 2014

Dear Friends,

After a brief visit to Kolar, India where Mike spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, he headed to an ashram south of Bangalore run by The Art of Living Foundation. Founded in 1981 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, The Art of Living is an educational and humanitarian movement engaged in stress-management and service initiatives. The organization operates globally in 152 countries and has touched the lives of over 370 million people.

All of the trainers had one day to prepare for the classes and work with the Art of Living staff to work out the logistics for the course. It took a while to locate a suitable classroom and outdoor workspace, school busses to get them from the ashram to the training site, last minute tools and supplies and the proper filter media. Everyone pulled together and they enjoyed a successful five day training for sixty people from 16 different organizations interested in the BioSand filter technology. Between the two training sessions, the participants represented 22 out of 28 States in India, bringing us closer to our goal of spreading this clean water technology to all areas of India.

The highlight of our week was an audience with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and his all-out support for our technology declaring that every village in the country should have BioSand water filters. He suggested that he feature the filters on his upcoming 2,000 kilometer train trip throughout Andhra Pradesh, one of the largest States in India. He is planning 21 stops on this private train trip, each one draws hundreds of thousands of people eager to hear his words and benefit from his wisdom. After the audience with Sri Sri, our group met with the trip organizers to brainstorm the logistics of placing 21 filters at the train stops near Sri Sri’s speaking platform.

With the trainings over and everyone going their separate ways, we reflect back on the experience and need to single out Shivani Kumar, our country representative for India for her outstanding efforts to organize and host these events. She spent countless hours contacting organizations in India who would be interested in the BioSand filter technology. She made arrangements with the ashram staffs in Rishikesh and Bangalore for housing trainers and participants locating a proper venue for the classroom and hands-on portion of our program. During the training session she became the go-to person who handled problems ranging from room registration and tuition issues for the participants to calling for the late school busses to take us to lunch. These trainings and the excellent results would not be possible without her...thanks Shivaniji.

Mike has spent his last three days in India with the Pragathi Organization in Mysore. This organization supports the marginalized tribal people who live in the forests and jungles around Mysore. He spent two days in the villages seeing the effect of the BioSand filter on the lives of the people who live there. The villages are in the middle of tiger preserves and the forests are full of tigers, leopards, elephants, snakes and wild boar and buffalo. The people live in primitive bamboo and mud huts and gather food from the forest. Mind you, tourists who drive through the preserves are not allowed to get out of their vehicles because of the dangerous conditions. Our tribal people live with these dangerous animals without protection. It is a common sight to see tigers walk through the villages in the evening, making their way to the rivers and lakes for a drink of water.

They had to park their SUV on the side of the road and took paths through the forest to reach the villages. Sharanappa, the founder of the Pragathi Organization, is very much at home in these primitive villages. As a young man he left his comfortable life in Mysore and spent three months in the forest living with these tribal people. At first they did not accept him and he spent many frightening nights in the forest alone, fending off the animals and trying to keep warm with a burlap sack. Eventually he gained their confidence and friendship and they taught him to avoid the animals and how to find food from the plants in the forest. He has spent his entire adult life helping these simple forest people to better their lives.

Getting filters to these villages is a herculean task. The filters need to be transported from Mysore by truck for two to three hours over bad roads and then hand carried over jungle paths to reach the villages. The water sources for these people are pits dug in the sand and mud or rivers and lakes near their villages. These water sources are also used by the animals and are highly polluted. The villagers are ecstatic about the filters which produce clean drinking water from these polluted sources. They went on and on about how the filters are changing their lives by keeping them healthy, eliminating water-borne illness and skin diseases. In two villages, because of the lack of disease, families have pooled their money saved from not buying medicine and going to clinics and hospitals. They asked Mike to tell them what to do with the savings. He suggested that they use the money to buy seeds and plant kitchen gardens around their homes. They have bamboo and thorn fences around their homes to keep animals away. These fences will also protect the gardens from animals that may eat the produce.

The two days spent in the forest were exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. Countless miles trekking in 90 plus degree heat were rewarded by grateful people who have had their lives vastly improved in a measurable way. So far, we have distributed 1,200 filters to families in this region. Our goal is to reach all 15,000 families, a major task but a goal worth struggling for. We need your support!

Your friends, Cathy & Mike

South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc. 11 Wadsworth Lane
Wallingford, CT 06492 USA www.sapwii.org 

More pictures from Mike and Cathy's trip can be found by clicking here.