Making a Real Difference

A college campus is an area where awareness is briefly raised to great heights and the cause quickly forgotten. It is a place of meaningless sound and fury. Hardly a week passes on the academic calendar when we are not asked to be more conscious of someone else’s great concern. In other words, a college campus is a place where moral exhibitionists strut their stuff like peacocks spreading their fans during breeding season.
The problem with these awareness raisers is that the great majority of them consider their task done when they leave the stage. Awareness was raised and now it’s up to somebody else to actually do something.
This is because the real motive behind awareness raising has nothing to do with solutions. The point of the whole exercise was to simply satisfy the narcissism of the person trying to raise my awareness. He (or she) is better than the rest of us because he (or she) cares more than we do.
Far less common on a college campus is the student who endeavors to selflessly elevate the condition of his fellow man. It was just one of these rare occasions that caught my eye recently.
Earlier this week, I picked up the local newspaper and felt my soul fill with dread. The headline read: “African dry season concerns WSU students.” My warning lights flashed. Somebody had run across an article in a magazine somewhere and now wanted to raise my awareness regarding a problem he had just discovered. My first instinct was to turn to the sports section or something. Once again, it appeared that somebody was going to try and raise my awareness. Isn’t this summer vacation? I’m supposed to be free of these sanctimonious frauds until the fall semester starts. For reasons I don’t yet know, and against my better judgment, I read the article and realized that even in the sterile earth of a university, seeds can germinate and grow.
I learned that four young men from Washington State University had discovered a problem and, contrary to university tradition, has decided to do something about it themselves. One of them had even postponed medical school so that he could see this project through. If we assume that postponing medical school one year will result in a reduction of one year’s worth of the highest salary this young man might expect, then he has already donated his own money well into six figures.
Travis Meyer, Kyle Kraemer, Jeff Evans and Dan Good learned that the seasonal drought in Malawi cripples agriculture and that irrigation could do wonders there. The problem is that irrigation systems, as we know them, are very expensive to build and maintain. So, these gentlemen devised a human powered pump that can be built and maintained using locally available materials. And, they’re putting their lives on hold to deliver their creations to those who need it.
Malawi is one of the poorest nations on earth. Average annual income is only $600. A little smaller than Pennsylvania, only 20% of Malawi’s landmass is potentially arable, and less than 2% is actually farmed permanently. Irrigation water only reaches 220 square miles of Malawi’s farmland. That’s a quarter the size of Latah county or a tenth the size of Whitman county. Nevertheless, this feeble agriculture has to feed 13 million citizens and accounts for more than a third of Malawi’s gross domestic product. Anything that could deliver more water to the agricultural fields will improve the condition of the entire country.
Most of the world’s prosperous countries first had to farm successfully and feed its people before they could devote resources to exporting luxury automobiles or camera phones. The foot-operated treadle pump will not bring Malawi into the era of big screen plasma television exporters, but it will allow the country to devote more of its most precious resource, its people, to other economic endeavors.
That young men such as this can spring forth in the moral vacuum that American higher education has become proves that ethical development cannot be left to schools, but must come from traditional sources, such as culture, family and church.
These men are just starting to raise the money that will be required to begin delivery of what they hope will be 300,000 pumps to Malawi.
To help, e-mail Travis at temeyer@wsu.edu