Guest Writer - James Shelley

You have seen them thousands of times before: hungry, forlorn children on the television screen. And then, like a divine ray of numerical hope, up flashes a promising 1-800 number and the opportunity to “sponsor a child” in a developing country. You do not even have to be watching TV to encounter this humanitarian plea: child sponsorship organizations promote at concerts, put ads on Facebook, plaster billboards and syndicate material through the most distained communication medium in the world: junk mail.

It is hard to argue against the benefit of child sponsorship in the eyes of a fly-infested, belly-extruded child. What kind of cold-hearted bastard would not hand over their credit card number immediately? Very real and natural instincts provoke us with an emotional response (which, not ironically, the producers of these ads know full well as they go for your emotional jugular). However, this article exists…

Guest Writer: James Shelley

“You’re kidding me.”

That was the first thing out of my mouth when Robert Dell told me about SODIS over lunch a few years ago. SODIS is so simple it is almost unbelievable. It stands for Solar Disinfection and it is a process now providing clean, safe drinking water to thousands of people in Africa.

The Process: Drinking water that is infected with bacteria, E. coli, and that is otherwise unsafe to drink is poured into clear plastic bottles, left in the sun for a day, and naturally purified by the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Free, clean water.

Hence my response, “You’re kidding me.”

Abandoned, dysfunctional wells – the pet project of many a charitable organization – lay strewn across the continent, as the technology to maintain and repair them disappeared after the heroic humanitarian well-diggers went back home.

The Water School, led by Robert Dell, employs national Africans to teach…