Last Week in Numbers

112 children received hot meals at The Kindu Klub

80 children received a meal at the Playgroup

40 children used the Kindu library

34 children attended football practice

7 families received medical care

Our sponsorship team visited 15 families

The Kindu Trust has a New Project! 

Old Toilets

It is difficult for many of us to imagine having to live without a toilet, let alone sharing a community toilet with 70 of your neighbours! However, it is sadly prevalent in Gondar where we witness that many of our sponsored families, who tend to live in poor conditions, often do not have access to any toilet at all or a dilapidated and structurally unsound community toilet. In Gondar town more than 51% of residents do not have toilet facilities, this means that they often use open fields, behind homes, and watercourses instead. With around 60 to 80% of Ethiopia’s disease burden attributable to environmental health risks, which include poor hygiene, inadequate sanitation, and poor access to safe drinking water, toilets and sanitation facilities become fundamental to improving overall health as well as providing basic hygiene.

New Toilets

The Kindu Trust has built community latrines before and we thank all the donors who contributed to providing these facilities for communities. In 2011 we took this one step further when we developed our Biogas project – the first of it’s kind in Gondar. The project provided toilets, showers, hand washing stations, a kitchen and a water tank for a poor community with exceptionally low standard of toilets. The most unique part of this project was the inclusion of a biogas digester, which uses the waste material from the toilets to produce gas and slurry. The gas powers four cooking rings in the kitchen saving local residents the cost of fuel, as well as protecting the environment through a reduced use of charcoal or firewood. The slurry provides fertiliser for growing plants. This facility has now been in use for two years and the local users are delighted with their unique and functional facilities!

Women using the kitchen in our first Biogas facility

For this reason The Kindu Trust is absolutely delighted to announce that we will be extending our biogas project to two other areas which also suffer with extremely poor sanitation facilities. The new facilities will replicate the last, including showers, toilets and a kitchen. We will also be taking forward learning from our first project. In the new facilities we will be installing gas fired injera ovens in the kitchen, as well as gas cooking rings. Injera is an Ethiopian staple food, similar to a sour pancake, which is eaten with almost every meal, therefore being able to cook it in the new kitchen will make the kitchen much more familiar and useful for the local community. These ovens will be available to local small business women who can cook and sell food from here, it is common that women cook food for local bachelors to increase their income and we hope these kitchens will support them with this. The Kindu Trust will also hold enhanced community meetings this time round to guarantee a sense of ownership and real input from local residents throughout each stage of the project. Local authorities are already involved and their involvement ensures a smooth transition to local ownership, and therefore stability, for both the facilities and the 4 job opportunities it will create.

This project is possible due to the support of Partenaires Association to whom we are very thankful. We are very excited to take the project forward and will be updating you as we make progress!

Turds in the Dark! 

This month we wanted to share a local saying with you, building on your new knowledge of the perils of toilet access in Gondar! If someone or something is really annoying you, you can refer to it as ‘a stool in the dark’. This saying was coined because of the problem of open defecation, which is so common in may areas as to be a generally recognised annoyance. According to Ethiopian explanations, a stool in the dark causes several problems: If you step on it, it messes your feet. When you touch your feet to find out what spoiled it, it definitely spoils your fingers. If you smell your fingers to check it further, it spoils your nose.