Happy Thanksgiving in advance…plus some info Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 8:40 am
Everyone will be celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States this week. The origins of this celebration are rooted in giving thanks and rejoicing together with one’s community after all the work done.
In that spirit, we at Poverty Stops Here will be celebrating with all of you…you who support us as we fight poverty in vulnerable communities. You continue to lend us your resources…time, money, voices. For that, we can’t thank you enough.
While we’ll be joining in the celebrations, we want you to know that our efforts continue. In addition to new projects we have lined up, we try to pay regular visits to our partner communities. During these visits,we sometimes find that there are new issues that we might have to address.
For instance, in October 2011, these visits uncovered a number of issues with some of the facilities that had been provided in the past. In Takalafia, these included problems with hand-pump wells, which are the primary source of water, aside from rivers or streams. There has been an increase in water-related illnesses, especially among the children in the community.
Hand Pump in Takalafia
We are now working on addressing these issues. We hope to be able to re-use some of the infrastructure that is already in place. More importantly, we are looking at understanding how the faults came about in the first place, and attempting to minimize the chances of that in the future.
This highlights the challenge that we face in doing our work. It also highlights the importance of a long term partnership with these communities. We work with them over a period of time to ensure that the progress made in the past is not undone because we are not there to help maintain momentum.
As always, you can keep up with our progress on our website.
We wish you a fantastic Thanksgiving! Save some turkey for us!
The PSH Team
