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IN DEPTH: CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP
Small groups find mission in developing world
By Steve Wilhelm
Staff Writer
The Puget Sound Business Journal
From the May 13, 2005 print edition
Scott Mantz went to Vietnam in 2001 looking for an adventure. Instead he found a calling.
Since his visit, Mantz and his partner, Yen Ngo, have developed 14 water wells in poor Vietnamese villages through their organization, Care to Help Project. The project has a 15th well underway and also has built a school for 100 Vietnamese children. It's now planning to build a dormitory at a nearby orphanage.
Mantz's case is not unique. Many people from this region who have visited the world's developing nations return with a new sense of life direction, dropping what had been a relatively self-centered existence and replacing it with a focus on the needs of others.
These people have been creating an array of small organizations, many of them focused on specific beneficial work in certain parts of the world. In most cases, these founders are keeping their organizations small, focused and independent from larger international aid groups, partly to stay under the radar of governments that -- in some cases -- can be more problematic than helpful.
That means Mantz continues to operate landscape design firm Scott Mantz Associates in Seattle and Ngo continues to work as a financial aid counselor at Seattle University while they collaborate to bring clean water supplies to tiny villages whose residents have been plagued by disease caused by contaminated water supplies.
The tale of how Mantz got involved isn't unusual: When he and Ngo visited Vietnam they made friends with a taxi driver, who then took them to visit a village of about 600 people in the hills. But soon after reaching the village, Mantz and Ngo realized how many people were sick from waterborne illnesses caused by poor water supplies. Their next realization was how easily the problem could be fixed, given the region's easy-to-reach water table.
"The villages asked if we could help them, and friends on this side wanted to help, and we managed to put the two together," Mantz said. "It's amazing what you can do with a dollar in Vietnam."
He and some friends raised $4,000 to drill the first well. On a subsequent visit, they saw how much the well-being of the village had improved.
"The changes were so astounding. Everyone got so healthy so quickly," he said.
A similar life transformation happened for Roger Ferrell. He was a consultant to the electronic banking industry in 1996 when he went to Vietnam as a volunteer for PeaceTrees Vietnam, a Bainbridge Island organization that removes war-era land mines from Vietnam.
Ferrell's epiphany was realizing there were thousands of Vietnamese children who weren't in school, just because they were lacking the relatively slight financial support they needed. By the next year he'd started a tuition fund to support a few children.
Now his Bainbridge-Island organization, Kids First Vietnam, is supporting 300 Vietnamese children in school. It's also developing several other projects.
Ferrell since has abandoned his banking consultancy and lives full time in Vietnam, returning to Bainbridge Island occasionally to keep tabs on the United States office and to launch new projects.
In April, Kids First Vietnam, in a collaboration with Clear Path International, sent to Vietnam a container full of equipment for a new clinic to aid Vietnamese people who have been crippled by encounters with buried mines and bombs left from the Vietnam War.
Kids First, which has a $2 million annual budget, also operates Vietnam's first and only elementary school for handicapped people, a village for educational and vocational training, a pig farm and a sewing school. Clear Path, also based on Bainbridge, helps victims of land mines.
Ferrell said the focus on Vietnam among many of the local groups is no accident.
"One of the things that makes Vietnam popular is the war, and people's interest in reconciling the damage we did there," he said.
As easier travel and electronic communication make the developing world seem less far away, many more people in the Puget Sound region are being stirred to help in other ways.
Karl Hufnagel, a civil engineer for the Seattle branch of consulting engineer R. W. Beck, is collaborating with a group of colleagues to turn his skills toward helping people and communities in the developing world. He helped organize the just-formed Puget Sound professional chapter of Engineers Without Borders U.S.A. and is serving as first chapter president.
The group has 140 engineer members and is looking for international projects.
"The project has to be low-tech, and it has to be a project that people can maintain for a long time," he said.
One team is starting a project to design and rebuild seven schools and two orphanages that were destroyed in Sri Lanka by the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami. This project is a collaboration with Asian Education Development, another Seattle-based organization, Hufnagel said.
Soon the chapter will start designing and building a retaining wall for a village near San Salvador, El Salvador, to help preserve the water quality there.
"The anticipation is this chapter will probably be doing two or three projects simultaneously, given the size of our membership," Hufnagel said.
Engineers Without Borders also has student chapters at several of the state's large universities. The chapter at Seattle University just designed and helped build a school dormitory for a regional school in a remote area of northern Thailand. The school will serve children from 12 villages.
This summer, another Seattle University group, the Science and Engineering Project Center, will build a 70-meter bridge for people and livestock to cross the turbulent Dza Chu River in Tibet. This project is a collaboration with Herrera Environmental Consultants of Seattle and World Concern, a Christian relief group.
Contact: swilhelm@bizjournals.com • 206-447-8505x113
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