Their mission: Bring clean water to Africa
IPSWICH -- They are the first to admit their mission to create electricity in remote sections of Africa will require far more than prayers. It will, for instance, require some partners with deep pockets. Five million dollars deep.
Still, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are determined to bring electricity for powering lights, water purification, and appliances to impoverished African schools, hospitals, and clinics. So they are moving ahead with a prototype for their solar-powered project at their Ipswich farm, known as the Cuvilly Arts and Earth Center. Workers began construction last week.
''The passion comes from watching children take dirty water from the Niger River at 5 in the morning, in any bucket they could find, and walk miles to their home," said Sister Patricia Butler, director of mission support. ''That kind of sight is repeated over and over again, and if the water isn't purified they come down with malaria."
The sisters' ambitious project, called Project of the Sun, aims to create a 25-site grid throughout Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo using semiconductors that convert sunlight into electricity and store the power in 2-ton batteries.
If all goes according to plan, sisters working at the African schools and hospitals will be trained to operate each site, with a satellite link to the Internet for professional engineers back in Massachusetts to monitor the system.
''This choice of technology made the best sense for solving this problem, and I am not a solar power, save-the-world kind of guy," said Louis Casey, chief financial officer of Sustainable Energy Solutions, a Northborough-based company that is working with the sisters to design the system.
That a self-described Republican Protestant would join with Catholic sisters to design an environmentally friendly, liberal-sounding project is, Casey said, loaded with ''supreme irony." But he also is a pragmatist. He considered less environmentally friendly fuel sources, such as diesel, but ruled them out when a cost analysis revealed solar power made more sense.
''Once you pay the capital cost of this project, the fuel is free," Casey said. ''You're getting it from the sun."
Funding hurdles aside, another top concern is security because of civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the prototype built in Ipswich, where sisters will be trained on the system, will have the site's 45 solar panels on poles in the middle of a field, the sites in Africa will install the panels on roofs of hospitals and schools, surrounded by walls and fences.
''This is not Marblehead we're going into," Casey said. ''We're going into, shall we say, some rough neighborhoods."
Many of the compounds where the Sisters of Notre Dame lived in Congo were pillaged during fighting eight years ago, but things have more recently settled down.
''We trust that God will watch over them," said Sister Juana McCarthy, the mission's assistant general treasurer. ''That probably takes greater faith than the raising of money."
The sisters have raised about $200,000, which would just about cover the cost of the prototype in Ipswich. The sisters say it will probably take several years before they have enough money to complete the entire 25-site project. They are taking their funding appeals to some high-powered people, including officials at the World Bank and the Conrad Hilton Foundation. So far, they said, they are running into a Catch-22.
''Unless you have people already in place, if you have funding partners you can point to, then they consider it," said Sister Butler. ''That's what we're working on now, trying to get funding partners."
The sisters say the health and futures of an estimated 7,000 Africans, mostly women and children living near the 25 sites, depend on their persistence.
''Yes we do have great faith and determination," said Sister Leonore Coan, mission support assistant. ''But it's the people in Congo and Nigeria who have the great need."
Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com 