Ellie Nolan

Ellie after her hair cut

Ellie Nolan is a delightful, vivacious young woman with large, lovely blue eyes. She had brown hair to her waist when we first met, but on Neptune Day (see the We Are Shellbackers blog,) She was one of 22 students who bravely cut off and donated their locks to Locks of Love. When we pulled into South Africa and the immigration officers came aboard, they were concerned about all the shaved heads and wondered if there were lice on board!





The path to the filter hut

Ellie teaches Zumba every day to shipmates. She works two hours every day as a work-study student. And she takes three classes for credit, including a leadership class. The professor, Jeff Glazer, emailed each student two months before sailing and challenged them to complete a service project during their voyage with SAS. Emails of ideas flowed among those registered for the class.

Ellie, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, knew about Edge Outreach, a Louisville company whose mission is to bring clean water to those needing it. They supply clean water to Louisville. Ellie wanted to do something with water purification in one of the countries she would be visiting with SAS. Edge Outreach was very supportive when she called. All she needed was $1000 for a filter system and some training.

Ellie emailed other members of the class inviting them to join her and Erin jumped right in. Through Facebook Erin found Fred, a nineteen year old Ghanian tour guide, whose village in Ghana needed a fresh water supply. Meanwhile, Ellie took two days of training learning how to gain community support, install, and maintain. Erin and Ellie purchased the equipment with their own money and set up a PayPal account in hopes of getting some of their funds recovered. Fred went to the Queen Mother at the village to get her approval, a step necessary in his culture, and to buy the 55 gallon drums and a car battery needed for the system.

SAS students with village children

Once Ellie was on the ship, she organized a group of students to travel to the site to install the water treatment system. They traveled by bus on the muddy dirt roads of Ghana about six hours. The bus got stuck which caused them to get to the town late in the evening. The next day, in the rain, with the help of the villagers, they managed to build a hut to house the system. The sun was setting by the time the system was installed and clean water flowing.

The villagers were skeptical and insisted the students taste the water first! Then the water was presented to the Queen Mother, the Village Chief and the Council of Elders who tasted and accepted it. Then they joyously celebrated with a drumming and dancing ceremony!

Ellie and the Chief

Before the SAS students started back to the ship that night, they had trained five people to maintain the system which has the capacity to purify 20,000 gallons of water daily. As you might guess, many more 55 gallon drums are still needed. But the community of 4000 people in Senase, Ghana will have much easier days having clean water readily available to them thanks to this spunky young lady’s idea and her classmates dedication!

The celebration of the water filter installation