BY KAREN BOSSICK
Ryan Sandoz can’t take a drink out of the kitchen faucet without thinking about the boys his age who must drink filthy contaminated water 8,400 miles around the world.
“One in nine people in the world don’t have clean water like we do. And more people have a mobile phone than a toilet,” said the sixth-grader at Syringa Mountain School. “People in places like Ethiopia get their water from muddy creeks that often make them sick. Their bathrooms are unsanitary holes in the ground with a few sticks around them—and they make people sick, too.”
Sandoz has vowed to do what he can to change that.
He’s raising money for Lifewater, a nonprofit Christian organization with ties to the Sun Valley area that has been providing villages in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Uganda with clean water, sanitation and hygiene instruction since 1977.
Sandoz would like to raise $6,000—enough to equip one village with a well and sanitary toilet, as well as education teaching villagers how to practice healthy hygiene.
“I had to do a sixth-grade service project and so I set up a jerry container in Idaho Lumber. One man came in and dumped a lot of coins in it,” said Sandoz. “I also put a small container at Hailey Coffee Company and I’ve given small boxes to people to fill.”
Using the jerry container as a collection bank was inspired by the story of an Ethiopian woman named Gete that Sandoz learned about. She had to walk 40 minutes every day on a path where she could have been attacked by wild animals or kidnappers to collect water for her husband, four children and mother-in-law. She carried it home in two jerry cans weighing 44 pounds each when full.
She and her family were constantly stricken with waterborne illnesses, spending much of their money on doctor’s fees.
Lifewater representatives built a water source just yards away from her home, freeing her to spend the time she spent hauling water to plant and harvest crops. They showed her and her family how to wash their hands using a tippy-tap made with a jerry can that tips over when users step on a stick that’s rigged to it.
They taught them how to dry dishes on a rack, how to keep their toilet clean and how to store water to avoid contamination.
And Gete became a WASH (water access, sanitation and hygiene) facilitator for her community.
“The pictures I’ve seen of the children with clean water look like they’re having a much better life. They look much happier,” said Sandoz.
Guiding young Ryan through his philanthropic venture is Sean Martin, a former youth pastor at the Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood who now handles investor relationships for Lifewater from his home in Hailey.
Martin has seen firsthand the difference his organization makes. And he and his 18-year-old son Joey plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in June to raise money for Lifewater.
Recently, Martin left the United States on Friday, getting off the plane in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa on Sunday. He then rode in a four-wheel drive truck to a village in a region so remote there are no roads connecting some of the villages. He and the donors accompanying him visited a village where children were drinking out of a dirty polluted stream, a village where Lifewater was building a well and a village where Lifewater had completed its work.
“The difference between the villages could not have been more pronounced,” said Martin. “The unserved village utilized drinking water that looked like coffee with creamer, and the village where we had finished our work had crystal clear water.”
Martin and his son Joey, who works at Zenergy, have been hiking up Carbonate, Proctor and Bald mountains to get ready to make the 3,241-foot climb up 19,341-foot Mount Kilimanjaro.
Joey had initially set out to raise $6,000 but he exceeded that through Facebook donations and a movie night at the church. He’s now shooting for $12,000, which would provide enough money to equip and teach a mid-sized village of 200 people.
The two will leave June 19 and will climb June 23 through 29. Father and son hope to continue to raise money through Joey’s fundraising page at https://give.lifewater.org/fundraiser/1090830
“Sixteen hundred children die every day from waterborne illness,” said Martin. “Providing clean water and sanitation would reduce half the hospital beds in the world. And it would reduce poverty among families who now spend half their money treating waterborne illness and women in places like sub-Saharan Africa who spend 40 billion hours a year getting water for their families.”
Ryan hopes he can climb Kilimanjaro on behalf of Lifewater when he turns 16. He’s already got his mother’s permission.
“We’re setting our sights for four years from now, Lord willing,” said Michelle Sandoz.