Girargie
raised of $611,194 needed
Just a short drive from the historic city of Gondar is the village of Girargie. Scattered across the rolling hills of the Ethiopian Highlands, the people of Girargie spend their days farming rugged, rocky fields. Life in Girargie is challenging, but their proximity to a major city affords the people of Girargie consistent communication with a more urban area and allows them to set higher goals for what is possible.
Village Projects
- 11 water projects
1 deep borehole, 10 hand dug wells - 5 school buildings
20 furnished classrooms, 5 latrines - 1 health center
equipment and furnishings, 2 latrines
Girargie Need
Girargie, with more than 7500 residents, is a village in extreme rural poverty. The community needs extend from water to education to health and these problems build on each other, perpetuating the cycle of poverty. The first and most important need is water. Right now, the women and children of the community spend hours each gathering dirty, bacteria-ridden water. This task takes most of their time and the effort to gather the water does nothing to prevent the diseases that accompany such dirty water. The community needs access to water points that will provide clean, safe drinking water. Their second big priority is new school buildings. The students that attend school do so in old mud buildings that are crumbling apart. There are very few desks and most children sit on rocks or small mud mounds on the ground. The classrooms are dark and the environment is anything but conducive to learning. New, fully furnished and equipped classrooms will give these students the school that they need to learn and thrive. It will also help increase enrollment as more children will be likely to attend classes in nice, new school rooms than in old, dilapidated mud structures. The final major need is health facilities. Without any place to receive medical care, mortality rates in the community are high – particularly for treatable illnesses. The village needs a fully furnished, equipped, and staffed health center that will provide in-patient and out-patient care. This kind of major project will allow for maternal and childbirth care, vaccinations, surgeries, and intensive care treatment. A health center of this size would be able to treat the communities surrounding Girargie as well, which would allow for even more people to benefit from this work.
September 25, 2010
When Glimmer held it’s inaugural Let There Be Hope event, the generosity of our donors fully funded all of the projects that were proposed for the village of Girargie. In just over a year, Glimmer was able to turn those donations into fully implemented projects. Today, the villagers in Girargie are the happy beneficiaries of health, education, and water projects. A new health center provides extensive medical care to those in Girargie and in surrounding communities. The facility includes inpatient and outpatient care. With a full staff of health care professionals, it can handle surgeries, maternal and delivery care, and the administration of vaccines and drugs. Adjacent to the health center is a new school campus. The school has four new academic buildings with four classrooms each. Glimmer also provided brand new latrines for the students at the school. Inspired by the generosity of the donors, the community has taken ownership of its school and has put in tremendous effort to improve the campus. At both the health center and the school, Glimmer has provided access to clean water. A deep borehole project in Girargie supplies the water for these two facilities. For other parts of the village, hand dug wells were constructed to provide safe drinking water to the community members. Through these water, health, and education projects, the people in Girargie have been given the tools to help them make strides forward in their lives.
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Photos by Esther Havens; additional photos by Kristin Laughlin and Lynne Dobson.