Fremont residents Lee and Sue Mys are leaving their West Michigan home tomorrow to spend three months volunteering in Kenya where chronic rainfall shortages have caused near-famine conditions. By the time they leave the Mombasa area in December, eleven villages will have access to enough water to sustain them, their animals, and their crops despite years of drought.
During their time in Kenya, the Mys–volunteers for the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee–will oversee the construction of a well that will serve families living in Kilifu and Taita counties by working with long-time CRWRC partners the Anglican Church of Kenya and Pwani Christian Community Services.
“A lot of people wouldn’t care to go,” says Lee Mys, a food scientist who retired from Gerber Products Company in Fremont. “But this well will help a lot of people for a long time. Water won’t be a worry for farmers and herders in Kilifu and Taita anymore because they won’t be dependent on rain for their households, crops, or livestock.”
The Mys will oversee the well construction for the time they are in Kenya, and also manage shorter-term projects such as trucking water to four area schools, enabling them to remain open, working with communities to dig reservoirs and irrigation ditches, and refurbishing and de-silting existing water catchments.
The Mys are two of five volunteers who are helping CRWRC manage and distribute food, water, and livestock feed to a total of 112,000 people in desperate need in Isiolo, Mbeere, Tharaka, Narok, Kajiado, Turkana, West Pokot, Laikipa, Taita, Taveta, and Kilifi, Kenya between April and December 2011. In some areas, this broader response is direct emergency aid and in others it includes distributions of food in exchange for work such as tree planting and growing grass to feed livestock. CRWRC also employs a disaster risk reduction specialist to work within drought-affected communities to improve their ability to prepare for future droughts and increase their likelihood of survival long-term.
“I’ve heard it said that hunger is the deepest expression of poverty,” Lee says, “because people who are hungry have already sold off everything they can to feed themselves–they have no assets left. Many of the people we are helping have been chronically hungry for a long time.”
Besides Kenya, CRWRC is responding to drought and famine in Ethiopia and Somalia through several global alliances. In total, CRWRC ic currently delivering $7 million in emergency aid in response to this crisis, reaching 145,000 drought-stricken people (20,500 families) in the East Africa region.
To accomplish projects like this, CRWRC has 26 trained volunteer International Relief Managers (IRMs) like the Mys who are ready to serve in times of need. When crisis situations arise, these volunteers put their North American lives on hold and serve for several months at a time around the world.
This week’s departure will be the Mys’s fourth volunteer trip as IRMs since Lee’s retirement from Gerber Foods in 2003. Briefly, the couple has previously provided emergency food aid and completed 320 houses for people displaced internally by drought and violence within Kenya, as well as managed emergency relief programs after the Asia tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and the Haiti earthquake.
To schedule an interview with Sue and Lee Mys, please contact Beth DeGraff at 616-648-7821 (mobile) or toll-free 1-800-55-CRWRC .
