Featured Image: Pictured are Kapuradhunga, Nepal villagers and members of the So Pan Rotary Club who conducted a survey of damage to a reservoir and scouted where to build a sanitation station ahead of a rotary club project. Photo: Courtesy of Jill Fabricant, Ph.D.
By Breeana Greenberg
Monarch Beach Sunrise Rotary Club received a $60,210 global grant from Rotary International to build a water well and sanitation station in a village just outside Kathmandu, Nepal.
The village, Kapuradhunga, is known as The Single Women’s Village, as many divorced, widowed and single, never-married women live there.
The grant will fund repairs to the existing water reservoir, which was destroyed in a 2017 earthquake. The funds will also go toward building a sanitation station, which will consist of a toilet closet with running water and outside sinks.
The village has no running water, according to the local rotary. Women in the village walk two to three hours a day to get water for their farm animals, agriculture, and themselves. They carry gallons of water a day back to Kapuradhunga for survival.
“We are so excited to be able to help these women and to make their lives a bit easier,” Jill Fabricant, International Service Chair of the Monarch Beach Sunrise Rotary Club, wrote in an email. “We are so excited to have the grant funded and to be able to know that these women will once again have water in their village.”
Through Zoom meetings over the past 18 months, Fabricant worked alongside engineers and fellow Rotarians from the host club, Patan South in Kathmandu, to write the grant as the international partner.
Gosai Jee, president of the Patan South Rotary Club, initiated the project, which is expected to take roughly 22 months to complete.
Several rotary clubs contributed funds, including Newport Beach-Balboa, Irvine, Surf City-Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Metro-Washington, eClub of the West, Lake Arrowhead Mountain Sunrise, Lake Arrowhead and San Gregorio Pass. Rotary International and Rotary District 5320 also contributed to the cause.
Breeana Greenberg is the city reporter for the Dana Point Times. She graduated from Chapman University with a bachelor of arts degree in English. Before joining Picket Fence Media, she worked as a freelance reporter with the Laguna Beach Independent. Breeana can be reached by email at bgreenberg@picketfencemedia.com
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