This is Franklyn – fourteen years old, loves football (soccer to us Americans), and a student at Ebert Kakua School for the Deaf.

Roughly 9% of children in Sierra Leone have some amount of hearing loss, most of which could have been prevented. Many mothers and infants in developing nations do not get vaccinated for rubella, measles, mumps, and other childhood diseases that can cause deafness. Imagine being the parent of a deaf child in Bo: your child’s opportunities are already hampered by one of the poorest economies in the world, and they have to overcome the added obstacle of a communication barrier that seems insurmountable. You enroll your child in the Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf, a godsend for parents of deaf children, but you have trouble with sign language yourself. Maybe you worry about your child’s interaction with the larger community, and your child is having trouble reading and writing.

This is where Deeper Missions’ Hope for Kakua project comes in. Two DC-area teachers of deaf children are joining us on our trip this summer to provide training workshops to over fifty teachers, parents, police officers, and other members of the Bo community. Becky Rock, a teacher at Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, will teach workshop attendees basic sign language, including letters, numbers, and other survival signs, so they can communicate with the deaf children in their community. Many children in Sierra Leone are behind in reading and writing, as well; deafness makes learning to read much harder for the kids at Kakua. Our team is going to focus on techniques to teach and encourage literacy in deaf children along with basic sign language. Participants will earn a certificate at the end to show that they have learned techniques to teach and communicate with deaf children; special education teachers in Sierra Leone do not have formal accreditation, so our workshops may be the only formal training some teachers receive.

Teachers in any school face challenges as they work to encourage kids to explore, learn, and grow. Working with students at Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf presents unique challenges to teachers, families, and communities, but all fifty of our workshop attendees agree that the rewards of getting to know kids like Franklyn far outweigh the difficulties.

Kids like Franklyn are a joy to work with, and we at Deeper Missions are lucky to know him. If you want to help us out, please visit www.hopeforkakua.org – we have t-shirts for sale, and you can sponsor a Kakua student as well.

Today marks the end of Volunteer Appreciation Week, and as an all-volunteer organization, Deeper Missions has a lot of people to thank. We have been lucky to work with an amazing group of talented, dedicated people who have helped our organization grow and thrive.

Our board members past and present has guided us through the long and often arduous process of building a nonprofit from its infancy, and we hope they will continue to lead us as we grow in the coming years.

Last year we took our first volunteer team out to Bo to install the first Enviroloos in Sierra Leone. Our group of student volunteers from Virginia Tech rang in 2012 in Sierra Leone and stayed through mid-January. On that trip they also finished raising funds for a casava grinder for local farmers and a bicycle for a teacher at Ebert Kakua School for the Deaf to reach other deaf students in the area.

We have another dedicated team of volunteers heading to Bo this summer, where they will continue to provide aid to students and staff at Ebert Kakua. More next week on exciting developments within our Hope for Kakua program!

And of course, we have had many volunteers who have kept Deeper Missions running behind the scenes, by creating our first Youtube video, designing our website, providing invaluable advice, and allowing us to invade their dining room (among many other things).

Celebrating our volunteers is something Deeper Missions tries to make a daily goal, because without the wonderful individuals who give so freely of their time and talents, we could not accomplish so much. Between our board members, technical support, and missioners, Deeper Missions has been blessed with almost 30 volunteers since its foundation. For all of your help, we simply say: Thank You.

Derek summarized his report to the board, which included updates on project plans for the annual trip this summer. Deeper Missions has also been approached by several outside organizations that are interested in our work, including a minister at Harvest Mission Deaf Church in Nairobi, Kenya. He wants Deeper Missions to bring vocational training and sustainability projects similar to our Hope for Kakua program to his church. The board voted to consider a possible visit to Nairobi in 2014, and they agreed that Deeper Missions should remain focused on core issues: sanitation, sustainable energy, and clean water projects.

Our last major order of business was to introduce the idea of an inaugural fundraising event this year. The board agreed that our organization is mature enough to start an annual event, although what that event will be is yet to be determined. Lee Popkin volunteered to chair the event committee, which will meet on Sunday, April 21. We welcome your input! Please comment below or use our contact form if you have any suggestions or if you’d like to become involved in the planning process.

The board meeting was very productive, and our volunteers and board members will be quite busy leading up to the summer trip. We all left feeling excited, empowered and ready to do our small part improve the world.

We’re grateful to Child Health Foundation who believed in the promise of this innovation project and provided Deeper Missions with a grant to help with the project.

An added help came from a young man, Mohamed Nabieu, who I met in 2005, when he was still in Junior Secondary School at the Child Rescue Centre. Nabieu was in instrumental volunteer in the project, providing updates as well as engaging the local community to give them a vision of how this new technology would help protect their health.  Helping Children Worldwide recently did a nice write-up on Nabieu here.

Nabieu is now completing his final year at Njala University where he is working on a B.Sc Developmental Studies.

The purpose of the project is to improve community health and reduce enteric
disease due to pit latrine-contaminated ground water reaching wells on the grounds
of Mercy Hospital in Bo, Sierra Leone. The hospital provides both maternal and
neonatal health services, as well as general treatment to the Kulanda Town
community.

We hope that this will be the first of a string of installations at the hospital as it remediates its current set of latrines for the benefit of the Enviro-Loo which, by the way, is a solution conceived by an African company to meet the sanitation needs of African communities, without creating the dependency on flush water or septic waste treatment.

BREAKING NEWS: Deeper Missions has been approached to consult on an Eloo installation for a church in Kono District, about 45 miles northeast of Bo. There is also interest in assisting the local primary school similarly. Watch this space!

Deeper Missions is working at the heart of the problem in Sierra Leone. It’s most recent project was initiated to benefit Mercy Hospital in Bo and the surrounding community.

With the help of an innovation grant from the Child Health Foundation, we started our second waterless, solar composting latrine construction that will bring improved sanitation and protect ground water from leaking pit latrines to the hospital located in Kulanda Town, Bo.

Click here to read more on construction progress.

We’ve initiated a new sanitation project in Sierra Leone, assisted by a small innovation grant from the Child Health Foundation.

The project will provide 4 waterless solar composting latrines for Mercy Hospital. This will eliminate ground water contamination from using basic pit latrines in the area.

We only need $4500 by October to complete this project.  Please consider clicking on the “Donate” button to the right, today, to help make an important difference to thousands, visitors and the local community.

There’s also a Network for Good, “CAUSES” page for this project which provides more information, videos and photos. You can learn more and donate directly by clicking here.  Thank you!

Linda and I were pleased to welcome well-wishers who came to see us off and to go and visit with old friends who lived in the area; a wonderful surprise was to have a delightful young deaf man, Vandi, come by the missionary training center to say good bye.  Vandi was on his way to his job as an agriculture assistant supporting Manjama Clinic, one of the rural medical clinics associated with Mercy Hospital. Manjama also has a hybrid solar/wind power generation system to run their off-grid refrigerator.

Peter Jaka, local contractor, and Derek Reinhard walk the Mercy Hospital grounds to site the Enviro-Loo project

In the afternoon, Mr. Jaka, the contractor who led the sanitation project at the deaf school in January, came to Mercy Hospital to meet the administrator and to walk the grounds and discuss placement of the Eloos when they arrive and construction begins.

The location of the four waterless solar composting latrines will be in line with the master expansion plan, which was initiated for Mercy Hospital recently.

Sanitation projects at Mercy Hospital will benefit the local community as well as staff and patients

It’s an exciting time as the capacity of Mercy Hospital grows. The Eloos are part of the overall waste management plan and will positively impact the surrounding community.

While at Bo Hospital yesterday morning, surveying for the pediatric solar electric project, Linda and I also met with a group of business and nursing students from Long Island University – Brooklyn, led by Dr. Mohammed Ghriga and Diane Kilts, RN.  The students were in Sierra Leone for two weeks, experiencing a variety of jobs and activities having to do with health care as well as with business, learning operations as well as going out to support the hospital personnel during a health-screening outreach at a local town.

Before the trip, students had been tasked to research an aspect of sustainability in the context of developing countries; I was amazed at the insight and questions each posed in an impromptu round-table discussion we had–there were observations about technologies and challenges to solar, wind, biomass, waste management and the like.  In the end Linda and I were invited to dinner the next evening to continue the conversation along with eat some really good Sierra Leonean dishes.

Deeper Missions Executive Director, Derek Reinhard, meets Dr. Maggi of West Africa Fistula Foundation

At the dinner, I was honored to meet Dr. Darius Maggi of the West Africa Fistula Foundation (our impromptu meeting actually took place in an area of the WAFF’s current building at Bo Hospital).

Along with his passion for healing, Dr. Maggi provided a valuable perspective on medical business operations in Sierra Leone; he is keen to collaborate and I hope to continue the conversation with him and his energy engineers as he continues his work in the area.

May 18 — On the road…and what a pleasant surprise!

The past three trips I made to Sierra Leone, on the road near Freetown, I caught a glimpse of a compound which included a number of small solar panel arrays.  I made a note to look for it on this trip and, fortunately I have an awesome wife who pointed out a Solar Training Center as we zipped along the highway–this was the same location as the arrays I’d seen on earlier trips.

Figuring we had some time to stop (we were on our way to catch the ferry in Freetown across to the Lungi airport), I asked Abu, our driver, to return to the center.  You can imagine my excitement to learn of the “Barefoot Women Solar Training Center”, formed in partnership with Barefoot College in Tilonia, India.

At the Barefoot Women Solar Training Center at Konta Line, Koya Chiefdom, Port Loko District

The Chief Solar Engineer, Nancy Kanu, and the General Secretary of the training center, Edward Ananque, were gracious and met my wife and I to describe their mission to empower uneducated women in rural villages by teaching them solar electric installation and maintenance.

I’m grateful for the meeting and hope to learn more from them, perhaps even partner with them, in rural village electrification projects sometime in the future.

Finishing the vocational training building from a grant from German Embassy in Sierra Leone

The weather cleared and it was a steamy, busy day as Linda and I hopped around the city, meeting at existing and potential future project sites.

Our first stop was to return one last time to the deaf school.  They were fortunate enough to receive a grant for a vocational training building, which will first be used to give students basic skills in cloth dying (very marketable in Sierra Leone) as well as tailoring and soap making.

We measured the roof area with an eye toward a future solar project that will provide electricity for lights and fans in the classroom.

A maths class at the Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf

Before moving to our next visit, Linda and I peaked in on the students in class to say our good byes.  It’s been very moving to see increasing hope each visit as the students and staff realize that they can truly hope for better, becauseof the ongoing support from St Stephen’s and Ocean View United Methodist Churches.

Because Deeper Missions’ vision is to promote community business models which use clean energy or water and sanitation hygiene projects, Linda and I went to tour LoMa Builders, who have their own solar composting latrine design, as well as local building material manufacturing expertise.

4 sq ft Parry Tiles are more durable and can cost less, when manufactured locally

Mr. Amara Sonneh gave us a tour of the LoMa grounds, where they also train local youth in manufacturing building materials. Of particular interest to me were the Parry fibre concrete roofing tiles, which I’m told are more durable than the more popular zinc (corrugated metal) roofing.  Deeper Missions is looking into trying LoMa’s Parry roofing tiles on one of our waterless solar composting latrine projects.

Linda’s and my last visit was the most difficult of the trip so far.  During the Deeper Missions team trip in January with the Virginia Tech students, we met a pediatrician who invited us to the Bo Hospital in another part of the city.

Due to sporadic power availability, the youngest are particularly vulnerable.

The situation we found was that when city power isn’t available, and there are insufficient funds to run the hospital generator overnight, the oxygen concentrators cannot be run for children and babies in distress who are admitted overnight.  It was heart-wrenching to look into the face of an infant who is stable during the day, and yet whose future is uncertain if there isn’t electrical power after the sun goes down.

Deeper Missions is committed to designing and procuring a “tied” solar electric power system for the pediatric ward at Bo Hospital so that babies like this young one can be ensured they get a fighting chance at health, even after the sun goes down.  Please look for more information and, in the mean time, help us get a jump on this life-saving energy project with a compassionate, generous donation by clicking here.

Inspecting Eloos after 4 months operations

Linda and I immediately headed out to the New York Section of Bo to meet up with the director of the deaf school and the sanitation project contractor from January.  We wanted to validate the Eloos were operating as expected after 4 months, as well as collect photos and profile information at the deaf school so we could complete more student profiles for our Hope For Kakua sponsors.

I was very pleased to see the Eloos were being used properly and that composting and dehydration was already occurring.

The day was also filled with the excitement of working with all the students at the Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf that day–no matter the disability, children are children and young people are young people–full of hopes and fears, and always curious and willing to share a smile as I tried my halting signing skills while photographing each student, teachers interpreted, and Linda captured their interests and other personal details.

Fatmata and Kuru, 8 and 10, are students benefiting from the Hope For Kakua Program

Although Deeper Missions focuses on bringing health-giving clean energy, safe water and sanitation solutions to communities in need, the Hope For Kakua Sponsor-a-Student program is a natural extension to our mission as students are supported with essential materials and meals to help the learn at their best.

Linda and I are coming home with over 30 more student profiles to share with those who would like to help empower some of the most vulnerable of Sierra Leone’s population; young men and women, and children who, without the Ebert-Kakua School’s academic and vocational training, would be forced to simply beg on the streets each day to help feed their family.

Derek reviewing Eloo engineering diagrams with contractor, Peter Jaka

We also spent the day looking ahead to the next sanitation project.  With new engineering and design specifications in hand, I met with Mr. Jaka, the contractor for the Mercy Hospital Eloo project, as well as with Mr. Sonneh, of LoMa Builders, whose company specializes in local building material excellence and training youth in construction skills. I hope to tour his training and manufacturing site tomorrow

Both men are anxious to prove themselves in this and future projects which, along with improving the health of their communities, will provide needed work for a country whose unemployment rate is estimated at a staggering 70%.

In that time, the waterless, solar composting “Eloo” latrines were completed and Deeper Missions launched “Hope For Kakua“, our sponsor-a-student program to benefit the deaf school by providing needed supplies, shoes, school uniforms and a cooked meal every day.

Now, Linda and I are embarking on a quick survey trip back to Sierra Leone with three objectives: follow-up on the completion of the Eloo project at the deaf school, meet with the contractor and other stakeholders who will execute the Eloo project for Mercy Hospital, and to meet with doctors at the city hospital to discuss a solar power project for the pediatric wing.

Derek and Linda Reinhard on Day 1 of Deeper Missions survey trip

As you know, a trip doesn’t happen without a lot of assistance.  From donors who purchase supplies that bring healthy and empowering aid; to our home community at St Stephen’s United Methodist Church, who help underwrite our travel expenses and assistance with project costs; to our Deeper Missions family and friends who have also caught the vision and passion for making a difference here–Thank you!

And on this trip, I’m also thankful for our new friends, Deb and Moses Kamara, who opened their home to Linda and I after our flight into Freetown-Lungi airport, enabling us to rest for the journey south to Bo (little did we realize how much we would need that rest until we took the road to Port Loko!)

Linda won’t let me forget how I “oversold that road”–even though much of it was or was being graded when I traveled it with the team in December last year, 5 months and the start of the rainy season turned the road to a weaving, bone-jarring pot-holed ribbon of mud–needless to say, it was a long 2 hours. Gratefully, all the paved roads from just beyond Port Loko, to ‘beri junction, to Masiaka and on to Bo were smooth and wide open.