DENAN, "THE MINI-DARFUR" IN ETHIOPIA: TV VIDEO & EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DICK YOUNG - FOUNDER OF THE DENAN PROJECT
by MARISHA WOJCIECHOWSKA-SHIBUYA
15/08/2008 (MaximsNews.TV)
UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 15 August 2008 -- Eight years ago, Dick Young, an acclaimed Oscar-nominated, multiple award-winning documentary filmmaker traveled to a place in Ethiopia called Denan, also known as, the “Mini-Darfur” and the following is his three-part video on MaximsNews.TV and MaximsNews YouTube and an interview with MaximsNews International Editor Marisha Wojciechowska-Shibuya.
What Dick Young discovered in this remote region of Ethiopia shook him to the core.
It was a drought-stricken place, populated with thousands of people dying by the masses from thirst, famine, disease and conflict.
The people of Denan had fallen through the cracks, left with virtually no outside help, no government support.
In four years, The Denan Project, founded by Dick Young and a group of eight friends, has built a 29-room hospital, a water pipeline, cottage industries for the women, agricultural training programs, and continues to deploy extraordinary efforts to put the people of Denan back on the road to self-sufficiency.
This is a tale of extraordinary proportions in human suffering and humanitarian ingenuity. And to this day, The Denan Project, remains the only lifeline to the people of Denan.
Marisha Wojciechowska-Shibuya: The Denan Project video which you shot (and can be viewed in three parts at youtube.com (same as above) is striking in both the conditions you first found in Denan, Ethiopia, and in terms of the extraordinary efforts you have deployed in the past four years. How did it all happen?
Dick Young: I first went to the Denan area in 2000. The tiny town of Denan is located in south-eastern Ethiopia, close to the border with Somalia in a region known as the Ogaden. It covers about a 350,000 km2 area populated with over 4.5 million people, all of them 100% ethnic Somalis. The area is afflicted by an ongoing civil strife – a rebel movement against the government – and prone to recurring droughts and famines.
There was a huge and widely publicized drought and famine at the time of my first trip. I met up with an old friend (a former government employee) in the nearby town of Gode where there were some 200 journalists all waiting to travel out to Denan. Due to the security situation, outsiders could not travel easily to Denan and had to make day trips, not to be caught out on the roads after dark. My friend contacted the district administrator who agreed to let us come and spend a few days, providing us with a pickup truck, his driver, an armed guard. He spent a lot of time touring us throughout the region and showing us the conditions.
For some reason, Denan had fallen through the cracks. There were no UN agencies, no NGO was present. People were walking across the desert for 15-20 days, arriving at the Internally Displaced People’s Camp (IDP) and expecting to find sustenance and shelter, but there had been no food shipment to the camp in over a month. They even ran out of water while we were there, in such extreme heat. It was a horrible situation, and people were literally dying around me. I have documented the conditions in the video.
When I left, the district administrator did not ask for anything for himself. All he asked was that I try to do something to help these people. I did not know what I could possibly do. I returned home and eventually made a little video about my experience there and showed it to a group of eight friends and we all decided to see if we could do something. We have all talked about this numerous times since, and what is interesting is that after that first meeting, none of us thought we were going to be able to do anything!
M.W.-S.: What did you decide to do to help alleviate some of the suffering?
D.Y.: On April 26th 2004, we opened up a medical clinic with one doctor and enough medicine to last a year, in a tiny two-room run-down abandoned building.
It is hard to believe that in just four years, we have now just served our 45,000th patient – all for free. We have now grown into a 29 room hospital. Our hospital has a paid staff of over 30 people, we have ultrasound equipment, a laboratory capable of carrying out a battery of sophisticated tests, we are building an operating theatre, we just opened a Tuberculosis program, just started a vaccination program and a pre-natal and well-baby program, we have a medical outreach program, we have an anti-female-mutilation program (interestingly enough just as many men as women come to these programs and we have significantly reduced the female genital mutilation practice in the Denan area), we have an ambulance and a pickup truck. The major problems that we see at the hospital are: malaria, gastro-intestinal disorders, respiratory diseases (from cooking fires) and malnutrition.
We built reservoirs in five surrounding villages, we have just purchased a 20,000 litre water tanker, and we are building a water pipeline, which should be finished sometime around the end of the year. This pipeline is going to bring an adequate supply of potable water to the people of Denan for the first time in their history. The water provided through the pipeline will come from an underground aquifer, some 12 kilometers away, which fortunately is not saline. The people of Denan are providing all the labor and security for the pipeline free of charge in a show of their gratitude for our support. We will provide them with food for free as they are labouring on the pipeline, through our Food for Work program. Rotary has been very helpful to us in all of our water projects.
We have just bought a tractor and plowing implements for the community fields and have given the people training in new agricultural techniques and in the use of new drought resistant seeds. Upon completion of the training we gave them drought-resistant seeds and farming implements.
We have also formed a women’s group and are purchasing a large solar oven, which will be used by the women’s group to make bread that we will give to our in-patients at the hospital. The remaining bread is going to be sold in the community and half the proceeds are going to go to the hospital emergency fund while the other half will be used by the women’s group to start a micro-loan program.
We are also going to start a cheese-making operation, by importing dairy goats. These people have never tasted cheese in their lives but we have tested the cheese with people from the region who have said that the people will love it. Along with the bread making activity, this will be the first cottage industries in the region both of which will be run by the women’s group.
We are now the largest employer in the area.
We are building a kitchen because we supply at least one meal a day for all our in-patients. Some of our patients walk 15-20 days to get to us, and have no family in Denan.
We have delivered treated mosquito nets to every single family in the entire Denan district in an effort to curb malaria.
We have built a dam to protect the town of Denan from flash floods. (Three years ago, three children were washed away and 600 people lost their homes and possessions during the rainy season.) The dam is maintained by Denan inhabitants and in the last two years, no lives or property were lost during the flash floods.
M.W.-S.: What about sanitation?
D.Y.: Sanitation is a big problem. As we build the operating theatre and the housing units for hospital staff, we are building a whole sceptic system.
Also, we have just recently built five latrines at the IDP camp and we want to see if people will adopt them before we go ahead and spend the money to build more. This is a big change for them to use latrines, since right now they have the whole desert.
M.W.-S.: Why have you succeeded where others had not?
D.Y.: We are different from many other NGOS:
1) We are all volunteers. We do not have an office, we do not even have a telephone. A volunteer lawyer set up our charity structure, so that all donations are tax-deductible. A volunteer set up our website. And we do this so that all the money we raise can directly benefit the people of Denan. We have a local partner called the Ogaden Welfare and Development Association (OWDA), a local NGO.
2) We have always proceeded by first asking the people of Denan what they want and need. We may make suggestions, which sometimes they accept, sometimes they reject, but we always follow their lead.
3) The over-arching goal is to eventually make the people of Denan self-sufficient, and when we consulted the people we came up with a five-prong strategy:
· The first thing on their mind was health. They had no qualified medical care.
· Second, water.
· Third, agriculture.
· Fourth, providing a source of income.
· Fifth, education.
We are now just starting on the 5th leg, that of education. There is a school in Denan with about 1,000 pupils enrolled, but only some 600 actually attend. There are teachers teaching the 5th grade who have only gone through to the eighth grade themselves. So we are starting out by bringing in qualified teachers from the teachers college.
When we started, we decided to pick a goal which was reasonable when we started: the medical clinic. We knew we could not solve all the problems of hunger or water in the area. And all these services that we are providing are free: the hospital, the water, the agricultural training. Everything is free. We have discussed this at length on our board, but the poverty is so great in Denan, that even a tiny nominal fee is a lot of money for these people who have nothing. And we do not want to deny anybody adequate care.
In addition, I have a terrific board that is very active and supportive. None of them are very wealthy, but they are all hard workers.
And, when people see the video and learn of what we have done, people want to help.
M.W.-S.: How do you envision the future of Denan and your outside involvement in Denan?
D.Y.: I know a lot of people would question what is the endgame – that you have to get out at some point. And our overarching goal is to make the people of Denan self-sufficient, but it does not happen overnight.
We have the health issue worked out. We are taking care of getting the water and are dealing with the agriculture. So within another year if the security situation permits, we will have this community to the point where they can at least subsist: they will have food, they will have water, they will have health; and we are starting the cottage industries, so maybe they will have a little bit of money too. And then, education is the long term goal, which will take a generation probably.
In terms of the hospital, I think we will probably always have to have a presence there because it is such a big expense to maintain qualified medical care, but everything else I think, they will eventually probably be able to handle on their own. If the security conditions improve, maybe the government will then be able to take a more proactive role in terms of support.
By the way, the regional health bureau and the regional water bureau have been terrific in working with us and have both supported us where they could.
Moreover, one of our donors has been so pleased with what we have accomplished that he now wants to replicate what we have done, using our model. So this coming year we are opening up two clinics with local partners, one in the northern part of Ethiopia, the other in the West African country of Burkina Faso.
M.W.-S.: What has been your biggest personal reward from all the work you have done for The Denan Project?
D.Y.: First, I must say that I have reaped much more out of it than I have put into it. It has dominated my life the past four years. I am still working as a filmmaker but this has given me something in addition to filmmaking that I love doing, that is meaningful and that I can probably keep on doing for as long as I am physically and mentally able. And for me, the one thing that strikes me in all that we have done is that we have now served our 45,000th patient at the hospital, all for free. To me, that is unbelievable! It is not just about saving lives, it is also the fact that for instance, people get infections, and we can now