Union Member Makes a Difference for African Village

by James Parks, Nov 8, 2008

Mark Baetzhold, left, talks with Lula, one of the farmers who received a water pump.
Two farmers in Nyamuswa water their crops using their new water pumps.

Union members are well-known for their hands-on, community-based activism. For more than a year, Mark Baetzhold has demonstrated that unions can play a significant role in changing the lives of a community half a world away.

Baetzhold, a member of New York State Public Employees Federation Division 169, an affiliate of AFT, began in 2007 helping the villagers in Nyamuswa, a poor agricultural village of about 6,000 in Tanzania, to irrigate their crops and better feed their families. For two months he worked with the Malaika Project to help the farmers create an irrigation system consisting of 12-foot powered water pumps and tubing. The Malaika Project is a community-based group in Nyamuswa that helps to improve life from the ground up. Baetzhold returned to Tanzania in June to help set up more pumps and see what progress the farmers had made.

His journey to Nyamuswa culminates a decade-long effort by Baetzhold to get involved in international assistance. Saying he has a strong, faith-based belief in social justice,he tried to join missions to Haiti in the 1990s and to Brazil a few years ago. But each one fell through. Then he found out about Nyamuswa through his girlfriend’s brother, who works with the Malaika Project.       

In an article in the November 2008 edition of PEF’s The Communicator magazine, Deborah Miles quotes Baetzhold as saying:

Before the pumps, farmers watered their fields six hours a day using buckets and watering cans…It was hard to quantify the results, but each farmer who received a pump said it was a dramatic success. A farmer, Ari, showed me a house he had started to build. Ari was able to do this because the water pump increased his crop output, and he could afford to build a house with the profits. 

Baetzhold’s work in Tanzania already has energized his co-workers and other union members. Miles reports that PEF members and co-workers have donated $1,300 for more pumps and bed nets to protect children from mosquitoes that spread malaria.

Working to help a poor African village goes right along with what it means to be part of a union, says Baetzhold, who works as a citizen participation specialist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Union members stand with other people and help them when they are in need. [Unions] stand for the collective good and try to bring that about through action. I wanted to experience the dignity of the others persons [n Tanzania] and unions promote that as well.

He already is working on another project to help the residents of Nyamuswa build a badly-needed medical clinic. If you want to help build the clinic or want more information about the project, you can contact Baetzhold at mbaetzho@gonzaga.edu. 

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