Last week's Guest Speakers: Peter and Sharon Crean, Beyond Water
Posted by Franz Huber on Aug 06, 2016
Don't you sometimes despair when you follow the petty squabbles in the media, be they of a major international scale such as the current race (to the bottom??) about who will be the next President of the USA, the deplorable state of Australian politics based on personality rather than policy or the trumped up furore by the twitterati over Bill Leak's cartoon in the Australian Newspaper, telling nothing but the truth, so help me god?
Well, let me give you a wonderful antidote: join Surfers Sunrise Rotary (or for that matter any Rotary Club) and hear and see what real people can achieve to help those less fortunate in the world, in areas where a safety net provided by the Government is not even thought of, where public health is unknown, where the youth, instead of getting an education, spends 3 hours of each day carrying dirty water from some waterhole to their shanty, so they can survive. In the recent past we had Chantal Clarke with her project in Head Hunter territory of Vanuatu. Last week we had Peter and Sharon Crean and their daughter Liz, the organizers of Beyond Water, all the way from Nairobi, Kenya. They operate not just in Kenya, but also in Ghana and Rwanda. Peter is a member of the Rotary Club of Nairobi Lavington. Their life work is to assist the local population to get clean water from a proper well. This will free their young generation from the ridiculous time waste of carrying water instead of getting an education. Clean water can also be achieved by installing guttering on their buildings so rainwater can be collected. Clean water has the obvious, but not necessarily apparent effect of a major improvement in health. Health can be improved by having proper toilet facilities (no, I don't mean the flushing type with a bidet!).
Whilst donations of materials etc can be effective, regrettably, this is not necessarily the best solution. "Getting containers is not the problem. Getting them off the wharf is: I have to have about $10,000 in my pocket..." Peter advised. So, to support their project, you are better off to go to their website www.beyondwater.org.au and make a donation. The money will be used to pay for local labour and goods sourced locally. There is stacks of additional information there about their humanitarian projects.
Program Director Jo Gorman, Sharon and Peter Crean: the toilet roll in Sharon's hand and Peter's coffee cup have a connection: you guessed it: for the cost of a cup of coffee a day, you can sponsor a major sanitary improvement in a village in Kenya.