Colorado School of Mines degree in hand, the now 26-year-old envisioned himself puttering around in the engine room of the hospital ship Anastasis when he signed up for service with Mercy Ships in January of 2003. Three years later, he’s a water and sanitation project leader building clean water supplies for rural villages that doubled or tripled in size as a result of the extended civil war in Liberia. A service-oriented Christian mission founded by Western Slope natives Don and Deyon Stephens, Mercy Ships’ primary goal is to deliver medical care, relief aid and training in developing countries such as Sierra Leone and Nicaragua. Their Caribbean ship is currently providing relief services in communities damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
How is your work different from what you thought it would be? When I started thinking about international development, I was expecting to have a more supporting role. But I’ve been out in the villages confronting poverty, sickness and bad water conditions.
Are you teaching people to fish? We do get local people involved. We use a couple of local well technicians to oversee the projects and a lot of the work is done by people who will be using the well, so they know it inside and out. They get training with the pumps so someone in the village knows how to take it apart, identify the problem and replace what they need to replace.
What does a clean water supply mean to people resettling after years in refugee camps? They’re getting water from an open dug well or a river or a sink-hole type of thing and it’s not a good situation. There is nothing to protect these water sources from fecal contamination or anything else getting in there, and it comes out in sickness, especially in the kids. We’re hoping to put an end to some of that. The wells we are digging are hand dug, like the traditional ones, but we line them with concrete and seal up the top.
You aren’t paid for your service and have to pay $300 a month to live on the ship. How do you make ends meet? My parents have helped, and my brother and sister, and friends and members of my church, Canyon View Vineyard Church in Grand Junction.
Your work with Mercy Ships ends next spring, when the Anastasis is pulled from service. What’s next? I don’t know what comes next. I’ve thought about continuing the same kind of work, but land-based, maybe working with a group like Samaritan’s Purse, or Oxfam, or someone doing other water projects.
Do you think you’ll try to stay in Africa? I do. After the first five months I spent there, I came home for about three months and all I could think of was Africa and how to get back to Africa. You can fall in love with the people and the culture pretty easily.
