Donations help Rock Hill native, Peace Corps improve villages
An online fundraiser launched by a Rock Hill native earlier this year has now raised enough money to improve living conditions in several African villages.
Peace Corps volunteer and Rock Hill High School graduate Rasheika Robinson reached out to friends and family through a fundraising page on the Peace Corps’ website. Robinson collected $6,601.14 for her “Total Sanitation” project, a plan to improve the sanitary conditions in remote parts of Madagascar by building secure restroom facilities.
The Merina people of the Malagasy highlands live in extreme rural poverty, with most people surviving on a dollar a day. In Robinson’s adopted village of Vinaninkarena, where she has lived for almost two years, few people have access even to outdoor latrines and most use open fields for toilets, where human waste contaminates drinking water and threatens public health. Thanks to online donations, Total Sanitation aims to build new latrines that will serve Vinaninkarena and six neighboring villages.
“We are building 21 latrines total, but three of those will have double houses. In addition, we are building 15 wells and six different natural water sources for areas that are too high in the mountains to receive water from a well,” Robinson said in an internet chat from her makeshift office in Madagascar. “One hundred percent of the funds will be used towards helping my village and implementing this sanitation project.”
Robinson hoped to get the project underway before Madagascar’s rainy season hit in November and made digging into the groundwater more difficult. But, the country is experiencing a mild drought that may make the process easier.
“If it starts to rain, we won’t be able to build because the hole for the well will give access to water too quickly and when dry season comes the well will not have any water,” she said. “But when we are digging the holes for the wells we are having to dig further than we normally would.”
In part, this will be a do-it-yourself project for the people who will benefit. Each village has to contribute 25 percent toward the project, either materials, labor or other in-kind contributions. Once they have reached their contribution, materials will be distributed and Robinson’s group will begin building and training on sanitation. Robinson said the donations have made it easier for her to contact the people she needs to reach.
“Ninety percent of my job is public health education, but I am unable to execute my job properly if I do not help those less fortunate gather the materials they need first,” Robinson said. “I have been disseminating the message on sanitation for over a year and the response is always, ‘We do not have money for this.’ And now I say to them, ‘Here are your materials and now this is how you use this to improve your health and sanitation.’ ”
Robinson is enjoying her time in the country so much that she recently extended her Peace Corps contract for another 16 months, which will keep her in the village until well into 2016. Her next project will be to improve the state of the local library by soliciting donations of books, globes, maps and desks.
“We have over 5,000 students in school, but less than 2,000 books and a room that holds 10 children at most,” she said. “I have been working with the librarian and school officials to promote literacy here but we just do not have the funds to meet the demand.”
Donations for the Youth Center for Madagascar can be made at www.gofundme.com/ixy56c.
For now, Robinson doesn’t know exactly who donated to her sanitation project, where they come from or how they heard about it. But once the Peace Corps sends her the donor list, she plans to contact each person who gave something with a personal thank you.
This story was originally published December 25, 2014 at 6:24 PM with the headline "Donations help Rock Hill native, Peace Corps improve villages."