LPGA golfers help bring clean water to Zambian villages

This is where life somehow survives.

There is no electricity in the remote areas of Zambia where hundreds of villages weather extreme poverty and harsh elements. There is no indoor plumbing. Food is scarce.

But against the severe obstacles and odds, life goes on.

Increasingly, however, one precious resource is changing life for the better.

Clean water.

For centuries, villagers would trudge miles to retrieve water from a filthy stream, tiny lake or big hole. Sometimes dead animals would float in the water source. Disease was rampant, malnutrition abundant.

According to the Central Statistical Office and Ministry of Health in Zambia, as well as ICF International, one in every 13 children in the country dies before the age of 5 because of the lack of clean water.

Golf Fore Africa is helping change that. The organization, founded in 2007 by Betsy King, a World Golf Hall of Fame member who counts 34 victories and six majors on her résumé, raises funds and sends people to Africa to make a life-altering difference one well, one glass, one drop of water at a time.

“It was eye-opening for me the first time and every time since,” King said of the difference water can make. She first went to Africa in 2006 and just returned from her 12th trip.

A foursome of LPGA players — Cheyenne Woods, Kendall Dye, Amy Anderson and Kristy McPherson — went with King on the latest trip this month. Each got up to five shots and two pills to build up her immune system and traveled 20 hours. And each said it was the best trip she had ever taken.

“When you see the water sources they used before, you got sick to your stomach,” McPherson said. “When you think how poor they are, you really have no idea until you see it. Yet they take so much pride in what they have, and they have nothing. They focus on what they do have.

“Once they get clean water, they know it’s their vital source of what they need.”

King’s organization, in partnership with World Vision, a humanitarian aid, advocacy and economic development organization, has funded and dug 80 wells at $15,000 a pop. More will be dug.

“Water is life,” said King, whose organization also raised money to open a clinic in Rwanda in 2010 that serves 20,000 and expanded a school in Zambia. It also has shipped thousands of backpacks to the area, each equipped with a malaria-sanitized washcloth, pencil, toothbrush, notebooks and soap.

But water is the best gift Golf Fore Africa bestows. Under the umbrella Project Zambia, Golf Fore Africa and World Vision will provide 133 water points, 1,600 sanitation facilities and hygiene training for 117 communities.

“Going into it, you kind of have an idea of what kind of poverty people live in,” Anderson said. “But then you hold a kid’s hand, and it just grabs your heart. Those are real lives. And water changes their lives.”

Anderson noted that bringing clean water to a community enabled children to go to school because they don’t have to spend hours hauling water. It also allows families to plant gardens and potentially start a small business, she added. And clean water helps reduce water-borne diseases.

“Water opens all of those doors. ... I literally have more faucets in my master bathroom than they’ve ever seen. They have no concept that we can get tap water in our home. They literally have the basics of life, and that’s it. Each villager might have two shirts, and they wear one while washing the other.”

Positive attitudes

Woods earned her 2016 LPGA tour card at Q School on Dec. 6. She boarded a plane the next day and arrived in a village Dec. 9. What struck Woods and her colleagues as much as the poverty was the joy the villagers possessed despite their few possessions.

The favorite pastime, according to the four players, is hugging — “It’s a hug you’ve never had before,” Anderson said. Dancing and singing are close behind. The sense of community, of family, is overwhelming.

“They were the poorest communities I’ve ever been to,” Woods said. “But they are extremely happy and appreciative of what they do have. They love the little things.

“The head man of one of the villages stood up and said, ‘We live a good life here,’ and he was so proud of what his village had. And they basically didn’t have anything.”

Each day on the week-long trip the alarm clock went off at 5 a.m. and the thermometer reached 90. The golfers visited five villages outside of Zambia’s capital of Lusaka, each with about 100 people. The first four villages had an existing well that had been providing clean water for nearly a year. Heavy machinery dug a well in the fifth village of Chikwampu.

On some days, the group handed out backpacks — 500 in all — and some kids walked as far as 15 miles to get one. The players were awed by how grateful the children were by getting a backpack and a few things inside.

“Those are treasures to them,” Anderson said.

“It was as if you gave them the world,” McPherson said. “It tugs at your heart to see how appreciative they are. They can’t get to you fast enough to hug you and kiss you.”

Woods said the four shed many tears when they left the last village and headed off for a three-day safari in Botswana, where they checked off an item on their bucket list by seeing elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers and cheetahs.

Their minds and hearts, however, were back in the villages.

“You grew to love them,” Woods said. “I loved their positive energy. When they saw clean water for the first time in (Chikwampu), it was so powerful.”

Raising money

Dye can’t shake the image of the first building the group visited near Lusaka. It was an old brothel transformed into an orphanage.

“It was a dump,” Dye said. “And yet it wasn’t anything like what we saw in the villages. They swept the floors in their huts, and they were dirt floors. Dust was everywhere. But they had a roof over their heads, a hole in the ground to go to the bathroom. The people are so happy, so grateful, so content. They kept saying water is life, water is life, water is life.”

Dye said seeing the villages helped her gain perspective. “Over there they face tons of struggles, tons of stresses. Yet they still find happiness and they feel they are insanely blessed by God.”

Dye, with help from Woods, raised $15,000 for the well in Chikwampu, and now she and her fellow LPGA players have a bigger number in mind — $50,000. That would pay for a mechanized water system to service about 10,000 people. The group saw one of these systems, which provides water to a health clinic, a school, a shopping area and a number of homes.

The four players are steadfast in raising $50,000 — and more.

“The four of us can do that,” Dye said. “Water is so great, so powerful, so life-changing for them. We want to do more and more and more. I want to go back again and again.

“One night one of the people from World Vision got up and spoke to the group. He told us that, when you all go home, you don’t go home all the way. A part of your heart stays there. It’s so true.

“We can do so much more. ... We will do so much more.”

PHOTOS: Golf Fore Africa at work