Saving the world, one bucket at a time

By Nadine Gilmer
Sun contributor
“When you get started with one network of aid organizations, you never run out of missions,” says Chris Skellenger, a local musician and gardener whose humanitarian work started with the non-profit Safe Passage, which helps kids growing up in the Guatemala City garbage dump, and has led to other charitable missions. His objective is to save people in rural areas of developing countries from poor nutrition by adding food other than grains to their diets. It’s easy to understand Chris’ enthusiasm for helping the “third world” as he steps through aisles of plants in his greenhouse dubbed “little Africa,” while explaining how bucket kit irrigation, his new pet project, works.
Bucket kits cost only about $7 each are able to irrigate a garden that receives little or no rain water. The bucket is filled twice a day from “gray water,” water that has already been used for washing or cooking. Hoses connected to the bottom of the bucket run through rows of plants, and each plant receives water from tiny openings in the hose that drip a drop at a time. Drip irrigation was introduced in the United States by Dick Chapin, chairman of Chapin Watermatics and Chapin Third World Products in Watertown, New York.

Chris has set up a mock situation in his own North Coast Nursery near Maple City. In the small greenhouse, no water other than the water from the bucket can reach the plants, thereby simulating a “little Africa.” The garden is filled with corn, tomatoes, watermelon and other staples of the food pyramid that people in developing countries often lack. The plants are doing just as well as any others at North Coast Nursery, thriving and nearly ready to be harvested.
Chris and his wife Sue have already traveled to Honduras and Belize in Central America to distribute these kits and instruct the “on the ground” (or year-round) organizations on how to use them. Next they plan on going to Lesotho, the small landlocked African nation surrounded entirely by South Africa. Chris says, “Central America is a popular place for organizations to go, but we’re trying to get to areas that are considerably less developed and where starvation is a daily threat.” Although he admits that in Latin America he was surprised by “the level of poverty, the lack of government involvement in reducing that poverty, and how many on-the-ground organizations from all over the world were working there.” But at the same time he, “thought it would be more physically dangerous in terms of anti-American attitude. That turned out to not be true, people everywhere where just wonderful.”
The Skellengers first became involved with the bucket drip irrigation system through an article in Guideposts magazine, prompting them to start their own non-profit organization called 11 Oaks, whose website, www.11oaks.org, outlines the importance of nutrition for a healthy human and reports on recent fundraising events and trips to the sites. To raise money last year Chris and his buddies played music at the Hayloft Inn on M-72 and raised enough for he and Sue to take 40 buckets to Belize. This year they’ll begin fundraising in November or December with their sites set on Lesotho.
Chris stresses the importance of a balanced diet and the effect this has on people. He says that, “in places where there is little water, it’s like eating oatmeal for six months.” And oatmeal doesn’t provide enough nutrients to stimulate the brain properly. “When people are healthy they don’t develop a culture of hopelessness.” The website states, “in order to learn, you must have access to information and a balanced diet so that the mind can grasp concepts and retain information. The concepts of nutrition and hygiene must be introduced. In other words, the brain can’t learn if the body’s not healthy. Some cultures think it’s normal to get sick once a month and lose half of their children by age 5.”
What a perfect way to really help people in need: by stimulating their own thought process rather than blasting them with ideas from the developed world. Being members of Safe Passage and owners of a plant nursery, Chris and Sue Skellenger are the perfect people to promote bucket drip irrigation.