2012 AGM Announcement

We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome and announce the new committee:

Simon Cottrill – President (former Treasurer)
Dorothy Mortlock – Vice President (former Executive Committee Member)
Maureen Ryan – Treasurer (new)
Sarah Cottrill – Secretary (returning)
Peter Ryan – Executive Committee Member (new)
Clarissa Leong – Executive Committee Member (new)
Nick Roffey – Executive Committee Member (new)

All financial members of Handle With Care International are eligible to attend and vote at this meeting. If you are a financial member, or a monthly sponsor, you should have received an email inviting you to join us. If you didn’t, please email secretary@hwci.org.au so we can send you an invitation and details that you need.

Thanks to some volunteers, the website is now back up and running. We were looking at making some major changes to the way the website operates, and this unexpected outage has actually forced us to start implementing some of those positive changes immediately – so in the end, it’s actually turned out to be a good thing. Thanks for your support, and we apologise if you needed to access this site while it was unavailable.

New Members: Looking for the free membership option? You can find the link here.

Existing Financial Members:There are no changes required of you – however very shortly, we will be moving your existing membership to this site so you can login. We will notify you by email of your username and password.

A man receives medical assistance

The medical team are part of a small local clinic called Rumah Sehat Madani, which works on the ground with Handle With Care International to provide mobile medical clinics, visiting urban slum areas with doctors, nurses and pharmacists to minister to those for whom medical aid is often out of reach. Residents are given a full medical check-up and appropriate medical treatments – ranging from vitamin supplements to asthma medications and antibiotics.

RSM Team Administering Medical Aid for HWCI communities

After seeing the nurse and the doctor, armed with script in hand, residents receive their allocated medicines, as well as a healthy meal – an orange, green beans and five quail eggs per person, and a lesson in nutrition. The many who have just been told they are chronically malnourished listen carefully, while the children devour their oranges and the women feed their babies the eggs.

Urban poverty is often transient and, with a growing migrant population placing pressure on land resources, many slums such as this one are being bulldozed to make way for upmarket development projects. Residents in such areas are often forced to move with little notice to unfamiliar areas without the support of their established communities.

Handle With Care International sponsors medical clinics, such as this one, to provide medical services free of charge to these people, creating medical records that can be accessed at other clinics and mobile services throughout the city and providing some semblance of continuity of care when residents are forced to move on.

Donations to support this service can be made via the Handle With Care International Store (accessed via the main website) or by contacting treasurer@hwci.org.au. For information on assisting us with our work, either fundraising or on one of our Aid Trips where you can see our medical team’s work first hand, contact secretary@hwci.org.au.

The HWCI and RSM Team working together

A modified version of this article also appears on The Jakarta Globe

A 1ml sample of creek water taken from an impoverished community in Denpasar displayed a serious presence of E.coli.

As part of Handle With Care International’s commitment to sustainable health solutions for impoverished communities, in August 2011, we took water samples from one particular community to discover how contaminated (if at all) the water was that they were using in their cooking, cleaning and every day life. While we were expecting to see some contaminants – what we found shocked us.

Within 36 hours of taking samples, our petri dishes were full of colonies of E.coli and other nasties that would be enough to make you severely sick. To our shock, the worst offender, was actually from a stream that ran through the village; that particular plate had too many colonies to count.

E.coli, or Escherichia coli if you’re fancy, in western worlds, is one of the main producers of food poisoning in people and is transferred generally through fecal-oral transmission. Grossed out yet?

But that’s okay.. you wash your hands well after going to the toilet, right? Wrong. There have been findings to indicate that E.coli also runs rampant in beach sand as LiveScience reported, and has been found in ground beef, unpasteurized juice or milk, alfalfa sprouts and in human to human contact from places like day-care centres (not all children wash their hands, apparently) (source: InfoPlease)

So imagine having to drink water that was full of fecal contamination – boiled or not, would you be prepared to drink it? That’s what this community, and many others, have to deal with daily. If the water isn’t boiled properly, or if your child is playing in the river and puts their hand in their mouth – they could very much develop gastrointestinal issues – which at the very least, may dehydrate the child, requiring the consumption of even more water.

Communities are forced to purchase fuel, such as kerosene for their stove (which is another issue when it comes to poor ventilation and health) or purchased bottled water.

Handle With Care International have distributed LifeStraw Family Filters as part of our initial work in these communities. This allows a family of five to pour their contaminated well-water into the filter and then drink immediately what comes out the blue tap at the bottom of the filter – bacteria and virus-free. These filters have no replacement parts required, and will last up to three years. Allowing the families to cook and drink clean water, and save their money or risk their health, by having to treat their water.

While this in itself is not sustainable, it is a great start while we and the communities try to work out a long-term, sustainable plan for clean, drinking water.

If E.coli and other nasties like Salmonella are less-likely to be in the impoverished equation, then these communities are already off to a healthy start – through clean water.

LifeStraw Family Filters cost approximately AU$38.00 each.

Dorothy cooks up a storm at a fundraising event

Being small and run only by volunteers requires lots of dedication. We have a busy fundraising schedule that lasts well after the dust of the last Aid Trip has worn off our boots! Since returning from our last Aid Trip in August, our Executive Management Committee and our Fundraising Committee have worked tirelessly to raise funds to support our ongoing poverty alleviation efforts. If you are a Mornington Peninsula local, you might see our stall at one of the local markets, where we sell trash and treasure and merchandise purchased in Indonesia at a small mark-up to fund our LifeStraw program. We have also formed a successful fundraising partnership with Mornington Peninsula Youth Enterprises in order to dual fundraise and have held an Open Day and Plant Sale with them, as well as volunteering at the Mornington Peninsula Shire Council’s Rosebud Pet and Pony Expo in exchange for a donation to Handle With Care International.

Our Fundraising Committee also holds its own regular fundraisers, the most recent Poker Tournament Fundraiser was held on the 27th of November and was a great success!

Handle With Care International’s motto is “Care, Commit and Come”, and, whilst we strive to encourage as many members as possible to join us on one of our overseas aid trips, these trips would not be possible without the countless hours of work contributed by our committed volunteers throughout the year.

If you would like to volunteer at our next fundraising event, or have an idea for a fundraising event of your own, we would love to hear from you! Contact secretary@hwci.org.au to make a difference!

Sarah with a LifeStraw Family Filter

In Denpasar, the unequal distribution of wealth is something almost impossible to miss. Driving down a wide, meticulously maintained street, past row after row of embassies, banks and mansions, we would suddenly come across an entire community of shanties nestled between housing developments and government property. In Kuta, the very centre of wealth and opportunity, we found a community making its living sorting garbage, where children ran barefoot among the refuse. When we tested the drinking water of one family in another slum, the deadly bacteria grew in numbers too numerous to not easy. At the end the one thing that we all agreed on was that we need to schedule regular rest days! Some of us got less than four hours off the entire time we were there! One of the most exciting aspects, perhaps not from a donor perspective, but certainly from a poverty alleviation perspective, were the focus group questionnaires we count.

One of the things I love about HWCI Aid Trips is that I’m not regulated to the position of tourist or bystander, watching while the experts test the water, identify the problems, conduct their research, distribute the water filters etc. Every member of our team received LifeStraw training, and scientific training where it was necessary, so we were completely involved. It didn’t matter that we didn’t speak the language — the gratitude evident on the faces of people transcended the language barrier.

But don’t get me wrong — this trip was not easy. At the end the one thing that we all agreed on was that we need to schedule regular rest days! Some of us got less than four hours off the entire time we were there!

One of the most exciting aspects, perhaps not from a donor perspective, but certainly from a poverty alleviation perspective, were the focus group questionnaires we collected from voluntary participants in the slums where we distributed the LifeStraws. We collected over 100 surveys. All the respondents were remarkably honest in their responses, and their answers and insights into their own impoverished situation will form the basis of HWCI’s future development work in these areas.

All in all, three weeks did not seem long enough to achieve everything we wanted to achieve—and the team unanimously agreed that two trips was a must for next year.

Polluted water running through an impoverished village in Denpasar

In rich countries, like Australia, clean water is available at the turn of a tap. There may be water shortage concerns, but children in Australia don’t die for want of a glass of clean water.

Not having access to clean water has dramatic, long term consequences. lack of clean, safe drinking water leads to an increased chance of diseases like typhoid, cholera and diarrhea. Adults who get sick have less time to prepare food, to work, or to start a business. Children who do not die of the water-bourne diseases are often too ill to go to school, meaning they grow up with less choices, in poverty, with poor education and poor health and no way to break the cycle³.

Handle With Care International believes that access to clean water is a basic human right, and one of our new initiatives is the Clean Water Project.

Studies have shown that a success of a water project depends heavily on how significant the improvements in water quality and convenience are. The Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd editionreport, argues that water programs are unlikely to have significant health benefits unless they also have significant convenience benefits, leading to behavioural change⁴.

The success of a project should also consider how the improvements to water infrastructure are maintained over time. Evidence suggests that a significant number of water improvement projects are abandoned and fall into disrepair⁵.

It’s also the case that water is not the only, or necessarily the main way that relevant diseases are transmitted.

Handle With Care International’s Clean Water Project was kicked off this year during our Indonesian Aid Trip and consists of a four-pronged approach:

1. Research

Our team conducted research and collected water samples to assess the quality of accessible drinking in two slum areas in Denpasar. The results of these samples will be collated in order to establish the best way to provide these communities with long term, sustainable fresh water solutions.

2. Distribution of Life Straws

Created by Vestergaard-Frandsen, these water filters filter up to 181,000 litres of water, enough to support a family of five with microbiologically clean drinking water for three years.

3. Community Hygiene Projects

Last year our trial ran for two weeks and showed many signs of success. A priority of our April 2012 Aid Trip will be the reintegration of safe garbage disposal techniques.

4. Education

Research has shown that without accompanying education, many water and hygiene initiatives never achieve their aims. Over the next two years, our water project includes a strong sanitation and hygiene educational emphasis which we expect will have an immediate impact on the lives we are trying to improve.

Sources

¹ World Health Organisation (www.who.org)

² World Vision Australia School Resources Water and Poverty

³ World Vision Australia Laos Consequences Chart 2007

⁴ published for the World Bank in collaboration with the World Health Organisation by over 300 contributors

⁵ www.givewell.org – Water Infrastructure, In-depth program review

⁶ Image from UNICEF, “Keep It Clean”