Our guest speaker, David Hicks was introduced by Cliff Bilyea, although he really needed no introduction to this group, David being our Men’s Club inaugural President in the early 2000’s. David took us on an incredible journey that you would never find on trip adviser or any travel brochure and it all started with our own Men’s Club.

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Trip to Cambodia - Highlights of David’s presentation

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• A well project is very unique. Once the well is dug and clean water becomes available, that well keeps giving and giving without further money donations. One jungle-area well can meet the needs of 2 or 3 families. Clean water brings health and that one well will keep repeating the health benefits generation after generation.

 

• Dirty, polluted water requires large families because typhoid and other water-borne illnesses will kill +/- 50% of all children before 10 years old. In Cambodia’s jungle areas, there is no population census, no internet, no roads, no mail delivery, no addresses. There are thousands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, but their locations are unknown and they offer no taxation benefit to government and the government is not prepared to build schools or health services for unknown families.

 

• With a very high mortality rate and no government pensions or any other government benefits, children become the retirement plan and care givers for each successive generation. Polluted drinking/cooking water brings, at a minimum, constant low-grade fevers that lead to serious illnesses and early deaths.

 

• Each well that is built provides a “door” to leave extreme poverty and inevitable illnesses. For the children, that “door” opens the possibility for school, and a hopeful future.

 

• For the Men’s Club, the price of only one coffee per month per member would provide clean water wells to save the lives of literally hundreds of children.  I know, because I have seen it happening!
   

David