About Us - Our Model
Nigussie's Story
At the end of a brutally hot day last summer, a farmer named Nigussie unhitched his two oxen and headed for his home in Debeya Adere, a rural settlement about 100 miles from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
It had been an unusually demanding day’s work and, feeling utterly drained, he struggled to carry his own weight as he made the walk the hut he shared with his wife and their children.
Seeing the state her husband was in as he approached, Nigussie’s wife greeted him with a qill of water she had collected from a nearby spring. A qill is a small gourd that holds about a half a liter (half a quart) and he drank its contents without taking a breath.
That night, he passed what the locals call a “white night” as he was unable to sleep due to his increasing level of sickness.
He made frequent trips outside the hut to go to the bathroom and to throw up and by the next day, his condition had worsened considerably.
His wife asked their neighbors to help carry him to the nearest hospital in Assela about 20 miles away. Four men at time carried the makeshift stretcher taking turns with others in the group.
The journey took six hours and by the time they arrived, Nigussie was already dead.
As tragic as his death was, worse was yet to come for his widow. After losing her husband, she would soon lose three of her children to the cholera outbreak caused by a contamination of the spring where she had been collecting water.
By the time it was over, 25 people from the township had died simply because the area does not have a protected water supply.
One of Negussie’s nieces, a woman named Kebebush considers herself fortunate by comparison.
“My whole family was sick with cholera last year. My husband was so sick that I had to take him to Assela town for medical treatment. Thank God he is all right now but what would have happened to me with seven mouths to feed if he had died?” she said.
Today, Debeya Adere is free of cholera but it is still without an improved water supply so it could conceivably break out again any day. Sadly, stories like these are all too common in rural Ethiopia where two out of every three people still do not have access to clean water.
Preventable water-related diseases like cholera, yellow fever, hepatitis and typhoid kill thousands of people a year and in a part of the world that loses one in 10 children before their fifth birthday, diarrhea is the leading killer of infants.
Putting an end to this suffering for an entire community costs as little as $3,500, the cost of a simple hand-dug well or a spring protection scheme.
In the case of Debeya Adere, A Glimmer of Hope is currently seeking additional support from contributors to provide this community with clean water.
For more information about funding this project in its entirety, please contact Eric Schmidhauser at eric@aglimmerofhope.org. Online contributions to our general Water fund will go towards installing schemes in similarly at-risk communities.