Issue date: 3/5/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy of Kathryn Cunningham College senior Kathryn Cunningham, founder of Power Up Gambia, with the newly installed solar panel array that will bring more running water to a hospital in Gambia. [Click to enlarge]

What began as a cross-cultural exchange program during one student's summer eventually inspired a project that will save hundreds of lives, if not more.

After volunteering at a hospital in West Africa in the summer of 2006, College senior Kathryn Cunningham founded a non-profit organization that uses solar power to provide the energy and running water the hospital desperately needed.

Cunningham was inspired by her father's stories of the Peace Corps to travel to The Gambia, a country in West Africa, through a program called Operation Crossroads Africa.

She volunteered at a five-year-old hospital that only had electricity and running water about eight hours a day, although it is the second largest hospital in the country.

The hospital can only afford to use its one working generator for about eight hours each day and usually designates four to five of those hours to night use. That leaves only three to four hours of electricity and running water for the daylight hours.

Without electricity, the doctors can't use an incubator or an ultrasound machine, perform surgeries or store vaccines in a refrigerator.

They are forced to choose which patients demonstrate the greatest need for ultrasounds and to deliver babies after washing their hands in a bucket, Cunningham said.

This lack of electricity is common to parts of rural Africa that lack access to hydroelectric power, explained African Studies Center director Lee Cassanelli.

When Cunningham returned from The Gambia in August 2006, she tried to return to life as she had known it but couldn't.

She described seeing supplies in an arts and crafts store and imagining how much the children in The Gambia would love them. Upon seeing a $40 skirt in a store, she thought to herself, "$40 would feed a family of 12 for a year and a half." She realized she had to do something.

Continued...

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