Stoyak gains perspective on water access in India


By Robert Guttersohn

rguttersohn@vindy.com

LIBERTY

Ben Stoyak, the22-year-old son of Liberty Trustee Jodi Stoyak, learned from a trip to India a lesson his mother has pushed here in the Mahoning Valley: the importance of water.

Jodi has spent much of her free time advocating locally against the gas-well drilling industry, saying it could pollute the water supply in Northeast Ohio.

For two weeks earlier this month, Ben, a biology major, traveled to remote villages in the dry, western side of India interviewing farmers who say one element is lifting them from poverty.

“It all starts with access to clean water,” Ben said while sitting in the Stoyak household where Jodi lives with her husband, Stephan.

The trip was part of an honors course through the University of Cincinnati. It was the end of a quarter-long course in which a class of 12 students learned the importance of interdisciplinary studies in solving the world’s complex problems.

It was an odd consortium consisting of design, journalism and civil and chemical engineer students. But he said they all played a role, and the diversity allowed the students to work on a much-larger scale while in India.

“You have to be able to talk and work with other people to be able to understand how the processes move,” Ben said.

On Dec. 7, the class arrived in the Indian state of Gujarat and linked up with the nonprofit organization Sadguru Water Development Foundation.

The organization endeavors to empower disadvantaged groups in western India, where it rains only three months out of the year.

Ben learned that for the other nine months, a mass number of villagers were forced to migrate to urban areas away from their families in search of water.

And the fixes are fairly simple, as Ben and his classmates discovered.

Sadguru and the community installed 15-meter-high check dams in rivers surrounding the villages, pooling water that is pumped to the high points on the area’s watershed. Then gravity takes over, feeding village farms, he said.

After the installation, the community manages the pump, he said.

Like water, the economic impacts would later trickle into the villages.

For the past year in the Valley, Jodi has pushed for a moratorium on gas-well drilling and the injection wells that are sprouting up throughout the area.

Over the summer, she persuaded the Ohio Township Association to allow an environmentalist speak at the organization’s summer conference about the possible dangers of drilling after she found out a drilling company sponsored the event.

“They’re using millions of gallons of our fresh water to drill for their own financial gain, and then the fracked water has to be dealth with,” Jodi said. “I don’t think people realize the dangers when you rely on well water” as your primary drinking-water source.

Fracking is the process in which water, chemicals and sand are blasted into rocks thousands of feet below the ground to unlock natural gas and oil.

But villagers in Gujarat now are realizing the power of water in fulfilling their dreams and creating hope for their children, Ben said.

“Water development there is bare bones from the beginning,” he said. “They use the water to plant more crops, which then they can sell, create a higher income, be able to make handy crafts, sell milk and then basically have the confidence and ambition to go get an education and require their kids to get an education. But it all starts with water.”