MPONELA, Malawi (WIAT) — Meg Packard, of Birmingham, is currently halfway across the world, trying to change and perhaps even save lives.
Packard is part of a team of volunteers with Marion Medical Mission, a non-profit that has spent decades installing more than 58,000 safe, sustainable drinking water wells in a part of Africa where thousands of people die from drinking contaminated water.
“I’m a lawyer by training. I have no good usable skills, but here I am on a team where we all have the same goal,” Packard said.
For nearly two decades, she’s been traveling 8,500 miles from Alabama to Malawi every fall. Malawi is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, where more than 70% of the population lives below poverty level, and where malnutrition and lack of clean water run rampant.
In Malawi alone, more than 9,000 people die every year from waterborne diseases, and most of them children under the age of five.
“Giving the gift of water, it is an unbelievable experience,” Packard said.
The non-profit is on track to install more than 4,100 wells across Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia this year alone. The job isn’t easy. Volunteers like Packard travel hundreds of miles over bumpy, barren, dust-covered roads in trucks loaded down with water pipes and supplies, on the way to villages often accessible only by crossing bridges barely able to withstand the width and weight of a big truck.
The role of the volunteers is to verify that the wells that have been built will provide safe drinking water to the villages, log the location of the well with GPS, take photos of the finished wells and take part in a handoff ceremony with village elders.
“And then the best part, celebrate, because the excitement that they feel when that water first comes out is indescribable. It’s over the top,” Packard said.
She returns to Alabama in a few days, made richer by her experience in one of the poorest places on Earth,
“It sounds trite, but it’s 100% true. I’m getting out of it a thousand times more than I feel like I’m offering,” she said.
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