We normally celebrate finished projects. In this newsletter, we give you a peek into projects in progress — what it looks like while they're being completed. | | New Classrooms in Guatemala | | With the Boundless Foundation and Seeds of Learning, we're building two new classrooms at Las Flores School in Guatemala. Here's what the old classroom looks like. Notice the wet floor from the leaking roof and walls. | | Here, the workers are bringing up the new classrooms. They will have a concrete floor and a sheet metal roof. They will last for 50 years. | | The local people are intimately involved in the construction. | | Olinda de Juarez is a 27 year-old single mother of two children at the school. She volunteered for the construction committee where she coordinates logistics, making sure that materials arrive when they are needed. | | |
Mariela Gonzalez, 35, is the principal of the school. She also serves as chairperson of the construction committee. She is a former professional soccer player and a big champion of whole-life activities for the school's children.
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Morel Ramos, 44, has six children, including one at the school. He's considered by most people to be the best builder around. When the school needed a construction foreman, he knew he had to do it. So, he volunteered.
| | Thanks to these people and others, the project is on schedule, at standard, and within budget. It will help thousands of children have a better chance in life. TGUP requires 20% contribution by locals in every project. These are some of the ways that gets accomplished. | | Save a Girl ™ Collaboration with Rotary International | |
TGUP is working with Rotary International District 5170 (South San Francisco Bay area) and its 62 clubs to provide 10,000 Save a Girl ™ kits to adolescent girls in Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal, India, and Cameroon. A SaG kit costs $6 to make and lasts for 3+ years. They are given free of charge to the girls.
This is a photo of the new SaG Sewing Center we are bringing up in Cameroon, to serve girls in West Africa.
| | In Nepal, our partner, Nepal Women’s Community Service Center, makes the kits. Then, they are helped in the distribution by another partner in Nepal, Little Sisters Fund. Here is a picture of the hand-over of 1,000 kits from NWCSC to LSF. | | The woman in the green and pink on the left is Kalpana Neupane from NWCSC. The woman on the right with the pink scarf is Usha Acharya, head of LSF. In this collaborative way, we get the kits out to remote regions of the most mountainous country on earth. | | |
The kits SO help the girls. Keeping a 12 or 13 year-old girl in school for $2 a year might be one of the highest returns-on-human-investment in the world.
Save a Girl ™ is one of the most proven, inexpensive, linear paths to improving the human condition that we are aware of. Consider, what will the world be like when we have liberated another half of human potential that, right now, is not fully in play?
ROI aside, does this girl look happy, knowing she can stay in school?
| | | Smokeless Stoves in Tanzania | | |
In East Africa, the Maasai people are migrant herders. When they do settle, they build mud huts in which they burn open fires for cooking and heating. The smoke is inconceivable to those of us who live with smoke detectors all over their homes.
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TGUP is working with Humanity for Children in Tanzania to provide hundreds of smokeless stoves for the Maasai. They are installed by a workforce of trained Maasai women. Here is what a finished stove looks like.
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Here is what a typical hut looks like after it has received the stove. Note the distinctive chimney.
The stoves reduce ambient smoke and CO2 by over 90%. They all but completely eliminate burns and smoke-related illnesses among young children.
| | | A New Science Lab in a Box in Kenya | | |
TGUP’s Science Lab in a Box (the “Box” is metaphorical) provides all the equipment, instruments, and supplies to enable world class laboratory work in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
This is a lab we’re rehabilitating at Kiamwathi Secondary School in Kenya, with the help of our Kenyan partner, Kiini Sustainable Initiative. The photos below show the lab prior to installing the SLaB.
| | When it’s finished, in a few more weeks, it will look like this one that we just completed at Ngungu Secondary School, a few miles away. | | You can’t imagine how excited the students are to be doing real Science, and not just reading about it in a (typically worn out, too-often boring) textbook. This year, we are adding Uganda and Philippines to the countries where SlaBs are being delivered. With enough SLaBs installed, we will raise the scientific IQ of the human race. | | |
Final Word
Too often, we focus on the costs, or the schedule, or some other material facet of what we do. Those things are easy to measure, and so, easy to imagine that they are what is most important. We believe in measurement, but shouldn’t confuse it with reality.
The reality is that all of our projects dramatically reduce suffering or improve human opportunity to the people who receive them. That’s how and why we choose them.
At a large scale, the improvements will alter the trajectory of human development, for the better. Think of millions more girls being able to finish school. We have no idea what the impact will be, but if we believe in education, which we certainly do for ourselves (don’t we?), it can only be good.
Or, think of tens of millions of children actually learning and doing Science, as opposed to simply hearing about it. If we believe in Science, which we certainly do for ourselves (don’t we?), it can only be good.
The startling thing is how inexpensive these changes actually are, and how readily accessible they are for those of us with the courage to try. That is the whole burden of these newsletters: to document to you that we actually can change the world with what amounts to pocket change from those who help. We are.
Thank you to those who make this work possible. We are honored by your trust and constantly inspired to do more. It’s working.
TGUP
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The Global Uplift Project
tgup.org
4164 Stanford Way
Livermore, CA 94550
100% of all donations are tax deductible
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