Before we left for Nigeria, I was talking with some coworkers about what we were doing, and they asked if I had contacted the newspaper to tell them our story. I wasn't planning on doing that, but after talking with Andy & Penny some more, they convinced me that people needed to hear good stories these days, and that our story of traveling to Nigeria was a good story that could encourage people. So, Penny wrote up a press release and spoke to the Des Moines Register prior to our departure. Last week, they contacted Brian and I individually and interviewed us over the phone, and here's the product! We're in the news!
There's that old adage: Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
But Brian and Kate did the guy one better. They traveled to Nigeria for 10 days this fall to build a whole fish pond.
The Des Moines couple was part of a team of 11 volunteers who spent 10 days in the West African jungle, figuring out the best way to build a sustainable fish farm for local villagers. They had traveled before - to Nepal, to Papua New Guinea - but this trip was different.
"We didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into," Kate said.
Brian and Kate were students at Iowa State University - Brian in agricultural engineering, Kate in architecture - when they poked around the Internet and discovered a nonprofit called Engineering Ministries International. It's an ecumenical program, kind of like Habitat for Humanity, but most of its volunteers are professional architects, engineers and surveyors. They've designed more than 800 orphanages, clinics, schools and clean-water projects in 80 countries since the organization began in 1982.
The group's mission intrigued the students, but the timing wasn't right until a few years later, after they'd graduated, married and found jobs. Brian develops new equipment at the John Deere factory in Ankeny. Kate is an intern architect at a design firm in Urbandale.
They were official grown-ups now, but they wanted a new adventure. So they reconsidered EMI, saved up some money and vacation days, and contacted the group's headquarters in Colorado Springs at the end of the summer.
The phone call came a few weeks later: Hey, how about a trip to Nigeria?
When they arrived at the site, after a flight to Lagos and another to Calabar near the southern coast, it was hard to tell who was more surprised, the Nigerians or the new arrivals.
"The local people get told a lot. They get a lot of promises made to them, but not everything always comes through," Brian said. "They'd been talking about this project for a year, but when the van pulled in and a bunch of white people got out, they were caught off guard . . . . It was a promise kept, in a place where that's not always the case."
The volunteers were caught off guard, too. A snag with housing plans meant Brian and Kate had to stay in a building nearby. And by "building," they mean a slab of concrete, some boards and a tarp. It was still under construction.
"It looked like a chicken coop made of plastic," Kate said.
There were mealtime surprises, too, like the breakfast of fried lizard and the starchy cassava roots that didn't agree with Brian's stomach.
But that was part of the adventure they wanted.
"Sleeping on a concrete floor and taking a bucket shower and eating weird food - for us, that's awesome," Brian said.
The biggest surprise involved the assignment itself. The site they had been told was a 30-acre L-shape was actually a 9-acre hourglass, overgrown with jungle. The surveyors had their work cut out for them.
In the meantime, the rest of the team set up their laptops and set to work on a master plan for:
- A pump that would divert part of the water from the nearby river into a cascading series of man-made ponds, stocked with tilapia.
- Another set of ponds for hydroponic gardening, where vegetables can grow with only a fraction of the water required to irrigate a traditional plot in the ground.
- A chicken coop (like the one where they slept, only better).
- A few small buildings to keep the production running - a training center, a dorm, a dining hall and so on.
Since the team wanted the operation to be sustainable, both in terms of economics and the environment, they designed a closed-loop system. Here's how it works: The pump circulates fresh water through the fish ponds, then through a filter that collects the fish's poop (more on this in a moment) and finally through the vegetable ponds. The plants' roots, which cling to an underwater net, replenish the water with nutrients before it circulates back to the fish.
The fish poop, combined with droppings from the chicken coop, goes into a contraption that converts the matter's methane gas into electricity to fuel the water pump.
The result: Locals will be able to improve their diets with high-protein fish and fresh vegetables with enough left over to sell for profit. Nigerians from other parts of the country can come to the site's training center and learn how to replicate the project in their own communities.
Since the end of the trip, when the volunteers returned to their homes in the United States and Great Britain, they've been circulating e-mails a few times a week to tweak the plans. They hope to finish the design in the spring, which means construction could begin a few months later.
"It all works on paper," said project manager Rex Barber, an architect who works full-time for EMI and has contributed to more than two dozen projects over the years.
He's particularly interested in the eco-friendly aspects of the operation in Nigeria.
"I'm so excited," he said. "I'm going to do one of these in my basement."
For the volunteers, the project was a way to stretch their talents.
"It's very empowering," Brian said. "No, we're not saving the world. But we're trying to make a difference and using the skills we already have in our everyday lives."
They helped in less formal ways, too. They passed out soccer balls one of the volunteers had collected back home. They chipped in to buy a woman a second-hand sewing machine and hung out with some of the local kids who had never seen a white person except on TV.
"Their whole world consists of the 10 square miles they can walk to," Brian said.
Kate made a connection with an 18-year-old girl who wants to be a lawyer even though Nigerian women are generally discouraged from working outside the home.
"We talked a lot about education, about dreams and desires," Kate said. "She asked a lot of interesting questions about the United States, and I tried to explain that not everybody drives a Mercedes and looks like Angelina Jolie."
But the learning went both ways - and it's still sinking in. Brian and Kate stopped in Paris for a few days on the way back to Des Moines and saw the city in a different way than if they had traveled there directly. They wondered what makes cultures so different, why building a fish pond is a struggle in some places while others produce a Notre Dame.
And they developed a new appreciation for home.
"We get upset when the Internet doesn't work or when we get stuck in traffic," Brian said. "Over there, people have cell phones but have to walk two miles for clean water. It definitely gives you some perspective. We have it pretty good here."
