Vision for Life
Dairyland Wind Purchases Sustain School for
Blind
Because strong winds happen to blow across
southwest Minnesota, a visually impaired youngster who lives
half a world away is able to work a specially designed computer
and prepare himself for a career.
For 159 such students at the Asian Aid School
for the Blind in Bobbili, India, prospects for healthy, productive
futures are higher than they have ever been in their young lives,
thanks in part to proceeds from a Midwestern wind-energy project.
Dairyland Power Cooperative of La Crosse collaborated with developer
Garwin McNeilus on the construction of nine 1.5-megawatt windmills,
agreeing to buy the electricity generated by five of those units.
McNeilus, in turn, earmarked the revenue from one of the turbines
to support the school in India.
“I wouldn’t have built the school
were it not for Dairyland,” said McNeilus, a resident
of Dodge Center, Minnesota, who has been involved with international
charity work for decades. “When you build a building,
that has a beginning and an end,” he continued. “But
the ongoing support of the children—that’s the absolute,
vital aspect.”
Besides augmenting funds for the school’s
construction, McNeilus was looking to permanently endow the
facility’s operations, and he said he was delighted when
Neil Kennebeck, Dairyland’s director of planning, told
him, “Sure, we’ll take another turbine for the blind
school.”
Dairyland’s payments for megawatt-hours
produced by the wind turbine near Adams, Minnesota, go to a
savings account that McNeilus draws from monthly for support
of the school, its programs, and the children.
Wind and Outreach
Garwin McNeilus, who acknowledged he “started
out dead broke,” ultimately became successful manufacturing
concrete mixers and garbage trucks. All the while, he said,
there was a desire to help less fortunate people, and he continually
backed international outreach charities of Seventh Day Adventist
organizations that built and staffed orphanages and associated
schools. McNeilus sold the family business and said that at
about the same time he realized the potential of wind energy
in his area of Minnesota.
“I went out and put a flag up. It soon
ripped,” he related. “So I put up another one. It
ripped, too. I thought, WIND!” Founding G. McNeilus Wind
Energy, he erected 39 smaller wind turbines near Dodge Center
and later was invited by a colleague to build the towers near
Adams.
“I needed to set up endowments for these
schools,” he said, noting proceeds from other wind machines
support different schools he has helped build in numerous countries.
The wind farm near Adams was dedicated October
27, 2003, and today McNeilus says his company operates 56 turbines.
The largest—more than 200 feet tall with three blades
each measuring more than 100 feet—generates 1.65 megawatts
of electricity.
A New Need Arises
McNeilus’ association with a number of
Adventist organizations paved the way for the blind school at
Bobbili, located in southeast India about 40 miles inland from
the Bay of Bengal. Asian Aid, an Australia-based supporting
ministry of the church, has built and maintained countless schools,
orphanages, and other facilities for the poor throughout India,
Bangladesh, and Nepal during the past 40 years, including a
school not far from Bobbili that McNeilus was involved with
several years ago. He told how Asian Aid Director Helen Eager
brought a group of blind children to sing at the new school.
Touched by the children’s performance
and exuberance, and learning from Eager of their need for help,
McNeilus visited the orphanage school where the blind kids had
come from.
“It was bad…not adequate to do
the job that needed to be done,” McNeilus related. “They
were in a small, run-down, rented building in town. They slept
and studied in the same room, so they’d have to roll up
the bamboo mats they slept on and take them outside so they
could have room to hold class.”
In the culture, McNeilus learned, blind children
are often regarded as “cursed” and are routinely
shunned by society. Eager, in an interview for an Adventist
newsletter, put the situation bluntly: “For people who
are disadvantaged, often these children possibly would just
end up beggars or would be pushed in a corner. The children
really have no hope in life unless we give them an education
and give them some hope for the future.”
Statistics from India’s Blind Foundation
tallies more than 13 million blind people, making up one-third
of the world’s blind population. Of that 13 million, 2
million are children. Eager said only 5 percent of the blind
youth receive any education.
Creating a Campus
Eager’s organization owned a 5-acre parcel
of land in a valley near Bobbili on which it was hoped that
one day a modern school for blind orphans could be built.
Once Dairyland committed to the power-purchase
agreement, the McNeilus family partnered with Adventist-laymen’s
Services and Industries (ASI) to fund the school’s construction.
They enlisted Maranatha Volunteers International to perform
the work, which took less than 100 working days to complete.
The resulting campus features 12 classrooms, library, multi-purpose
hall, two dormitories (boys’ and girls’), cafeteria,
cook building, nine duplexes, and guest quarters.
Structures built and the major funding source
for ongoing operations secured, Asian Aid supplied additional
sponsorships for the students so that the school could offer
housing, instruction, and care without cost to those enrolled.
The school’s first 100 children got their orientation
March 21, 2004—the same day as the school held its ribbon-cutting
ceremony.
McNeilus, who had pored over blueprints for
the project, said great care was taken in designing the living
and instruction areas to accommodate the blind children: smooth
corners on walls and furnishings, ample room for access, and
other safety precautions.
“The night after they moved in, we saw
them literally jumping from bunk bed to bunk bed,” he
laughed. “It’s absolutely amazing how they adapt.”
Asked what ages were represented by children
at the school, McNeilus said they could only estimate. “It’s
common over there that these kids don’t know their own
ages,” he explained, putting the age range for residents
from 2 to 20 years.
“We pay for every child,” said
McNeilus, noting that the school at Bobbili is Asian Aid’s
first blind school for orphans and abandoned children. He said
the $60 per month the students at Bobbili require is perhaps
twice what children at more conventional orphanage schools need.
“Blind kids are work; they take a lot more care,”
he observed, pointing to medical needs and specialized educational
facilities and equipment as expense factors.
Treatment, Training
Fortunately, volunteer doctors have assisted
with vision care, bolstered by portable laser equipment the
school’s benefactors have purchased. Surgeries to remove
cataracts and transplant corneas are common, and special glasses
have helped some of the visually impaired, particularly albino
children, according to McNeilus. Medical care is offered beyond
the school, as the volunteers and portable equipment make the
rounds of neighboring villages to hold clinics.
“For cataract surgery, they used to use
a fish hook,” said McNeilus. “People around there
are day workers, and they would be laid up after that. And when
they don’t work, they don’t get paid.” The
less-invasive laser surgeries made possible with the school’s
traveling equipment have eased that local burden.
Schooling at Bobbili encompasses grades 1
through 12 plus a trade school. “You always want your
orphanages connected to the schools,” explained McNeilus.
“That way, you can feed the kids from one to the other
and prepare them to be good, productive citizens.”
He said only about 10 percent of the students
will go on to college, so trade-school training—in disciplines
such as tailoring, carpentry, small-motor mechanics, secretarial
skills, computer operations, and agriculture—offer the
most promising occupational possibilities. In addition, the
Bobbili school’s teachers—many from Adventist Church
organizations—use a curriculum taught in English, which
McNeilus said is an essential language for graduates to understand
if they want to advance in India’s economy.
Most will go back to their home villages to
make a living, and McNeilus related how the students’
drive and motivation have already yielded successes. “We
have one blind kid who’s a book salesman,” he observed.
Growing Grades and Grounds
In the 30 months since the school’s opening,
enrollment has grown to 159, with another 25 to 50 expected
in next June, the start of the school year. The 60,000-square-foot
facility has capacity for more than 300.
Additional land adjacent to the original five-acre
complex has been purchased as it becomes available, usually
an acre or two at a time. Presently, the school owns nearly
38 acres, with most of the land used to raise vegetables and
fruit.
“On all the other school projects we
try to be self-sustaining and grow as much as we eat,”
explained McNeilus. “If there’s a tree, it needs
to produce food; there are no trees for just shade.” Sitting
in a fertile valley, the school has an advantage when it comes
to food production. McNeilus marveled at the blind students’
ability to weed the gardens “by feel.”
“These are loving, spiritual children.
They’re kind, considerate, and creative. And most have
never even had a place to play in their lives,” said McNeilus.
Thanks to a team of committed individuals
and organizations, the opportunity now exists for these special-needs
children to play as, well, children. They’re also given
new vision—literally in some cases, figuratively in all—to
guide them toward productive lives.
Fueling the effort, the wind that turns turbine
blades in southeast Minnesota can be expected to sustain the
revenue stream indefinitely through Dairyland Power Cooperative’s
electricity purchases.
In Garwin McNeilus’ words, the clean
energy is “a never-ending supply for never-ending support
of children.”—Perry Baird
High Tech Marking 20 years of
Rural Telecommunications
“Nobody should be put at a disadvantage
just because of where they live,” contends Frederick Anderson,
CEO of New Hampshire Electric Cooperative. Like countless rural
Americans across the country, many of his 75,000 member-consumers
couldn’t get high-speed Internet service; 20,000 of them
had to choose between dial-up service and nothing.
The broadband picture began to change this
spring after the co-op introduced WildBlue satellite Internet
service. Now anyone with a dish not much larger than a pizza—mounted
on a roof, wall, or pole in the ground—can surf the Internet
up to 30 times faster than before.
Rotating in time with the earth, 22,500 miles
above the equator, the 13,000-pound satellite allows New Hampshire
Electric to offer WildBlue Internet service as a member of the
National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC). Dedicated
to connecting rural America to high-tech communications systems,
NRTC opened for business with satellite television service 20
years ago last month.
Back then, providing rural homes with quality
television reception was equivalent to supplying central station
power in the 1930s, explains NRTC President and CEO Bob Phillips.
Beginning with a half-dozen channels, NRTC
eventually expanded to more than 225. Today, the telecom co-op
also markets sophisticated utility communications technology
to electric co-ops, including AMR (automated meter reading)
and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition).
NRTC serves more than 1,300 local electric
and telephone co-ops that make telecom services available to
30 million rural homes and businesses. NRTC’s staff has
soared from four in 1987 to 140. “NRTC is about bringing
new technologies to rural America,” Phillips says.
Balky 14-foot Dishes
The idea for NRTC came from a chance reading
of a magazine article. In 1983, Jack Wood, a National Rural
Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) management consultant,
read about new C-band satellite dishes picking up signals to
deliver television in homes beyond the reach of cable or local
broadcasts. The dishes were considered tiny compared with early
100-foot diameter dishes but huge— up to 14 feet in diameter—by
today’s standards. They cost about $4,000 each and often
broke down. Yet they offered unprecedented opportunities for
rural communities. At the time, an estimated 20 million rural
American households didn’t enjoy quality TV reception.
“The idea came to me that this would
be the next step for NRECA to explore,” says Wood, now
retired. In 1985, NRECA and the National Rural Utilities Cooperative
Finance Corporation (CFC) funded a feasibility study. This led
to creation of the national Rural Telecommunications Council,
which recommended creating a national co-op to bring members
new telecom technologies. On August 6, 1986, the council voted
to found the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative.
By December, NRTC had 118 electric co-ops and 16 rural telephone
systems as members.
Phillips, then an attorney with the Kansas
statewide co-op association, commuted between Topeka and Washington
for NRTC board meetings. In February 1987, he accepted the job
of chief executive officer. “I moved to Washington with
a suitcase and a couple boxes of clothes,” he says.
A Quality of Life Issue
About 250 co-ops signed up for NRTC’s
C-band television service called Rural TV. “It rolled
out in October 1987, but it was like a car without a passenger
seat or doors,” says Jeff Almen, former NRTC senior vice
president for corporate communications. “We offered ESPN
and a handful of other channels. But it wasn’t enough
to attract many consumers.”
In a scene reminiscent of big utilities trying
to freeze out electric cooperatives during the mid-20th century,
lobbying by cable companies kept the Disney Channel, CNN, HBO,
and other marquee channels from selling their programming to
rural people who watched satellite TV. “Without premium
programs to offer, NRTC and its members couldn’t continue,
Phillips recalls. “Our board had set an internal deadline.
If we didn’t get programming by a certain date, we were
going to pull the plug.”
Friends in Congress encouraged negotiations,
and in 1988 two days of round-the-clock talks with a half-dozen
major channels yielded a breakthrough. “After that, we
were off and running,” Phillips says
An early NRTC member was Adams–Columbia
Electric Cooperative in Friendship, Wisconsin. “Our general
manager at the time, John Steinhaus, was one of the original
directors of NRTC,” says Chief Operating Officer Allan
Klaus. “Back then, there wasn’t much for television
in the rural area. You got two or three channels, and that was
all. Our whole idea in joining NRTC was to bring a choice of
channels.”
Adams–Columbia Electric joined an alliance—Mid-Wisconsin
DBS—with Central Wisconsin Electric Cooperative in Iola,
three telephone companies, and a telephone co-op to create a
business and marketing plan to offer satellite television, Klaus
says. The co-op has recently added NRTC’s AMR and WildBlue
Internet services.
“I think that NRTC has made a difference
in the quality of life in central Wisconsin,” Klaus says.
“Eventually, our consumers would have received satellite
TV, but NRTC was way out in front. The competition came out
later, but we were the first to market it through NRTC. The
same is true with WildBlue. There are Internet services available,
but not for the rural customer. For a lot of people, WildBlue
is their only access to the high-speed Internet.”
Scouting New Technologies
Steve Collier, NRTC’s vice president
of business intelligence, is like a scout looking for promising
equipment before it’s widely known. “The Internet
is like an earthquake that measures 10.0 on the Richter Scale,”
he says. “It is changing the world. The new frontier is
not about improving things we already know—it’s
about entirely new things that we never imagined.”
He cites how long it took for various technologies
and applications to reach 50 million users: electricity and
telephones took 50 years, radio 38 years, personal computers
16 years, cell phones 11 years, DVD players five years, AOL
chat 2.5 years, MySpace one year.
“As the time frame squeezes down, ever
more new technologies are coming up,” he says. “We
are offering WildBlue, and we’re looking at WiMax and
BPL [broadband over power lines], mobile digital wireless phone
service, and even Internet protocol TV or IPTV.”
WildBlue Internet service has been so successful
that WildBlue Communications is scheduled to launch its own
satellite, WildBlue 1, in November.
Since its founding 20 years ago, NRTC has
progressed from offering big-dish satellite TV to wireless Internet
service and AMR. In the process, NRTC has lived up to its stated
mission of developing communications technologies that strengthen
member businesses, promote economic development, and improve
the quality of life in rural America. Like the satellites high
above, NRTC is positioned to keep rural America connected into
the future.—Peter Nye, senior writer, Rural Electrification
Magazine
October
1, 1987—Employees of the Rural Electric Supply Cooperative
in Madison watch Bob Phillips of the National Rural Telecommunications
Cooperative as he announces (in a satellite broadcast,
naturally) the availability the first program package
to be delivered via satellite signal to Rural TV subscribers.
The national organization had been created a year earlier
to help deliver the needed service.
A recruiting poster tacked to a local
fast-food restaurant’s bulletin board showed two alert
soldiers dressed for winter operations, weapons at the ready.
The headline by the photo read something like, “In today’s
Army, someone’s always got your back.” Across the
bottom of the poster ran “An Army of One,” the promotional
slogan used by that service branch for the past several years.
With all due respect to Army public
relations, it struck me that if “someone always has your
back,” it follows that you should be talking about “An
Army of At Least Two.”
Despite the main slogan’s nod
to individuality, the fact remains that military organization
and operations are inescapably about teamwork.
Irresistible Force
Such is also the case with cooperative
business. While co-ops encourage and celebrate individual initiative—note
the Ally of Cooperative Electrification Award presentation reported
on page 8—ultimate success of co-op enterprise depends
on activist members and a support network of similar, allied
organizations.
The concept of cooperation among cooperatives
is so important to business advancement that co-ops around the
world list it as one of their guiding principles. Outside the
business world, it’s not a particularly novel concept.
Simply put, there’s strength in numbers.
Electric co-ops offer countless examples
of this powerful dynamic in action, beginning with their success
in the 1930s against entrenched electric utility interests that
worked to prevent the electric co-ops’ very formation.
When a need arises—such as basic electric service for
strapped rural areas—an army of many can prove irresistible.
Together Into
Space
Fifty years after cooperatives began
gaining foothold in this nation’s electric utility industry,
another challenge demanded a solution of cooperative character.
Television, once an entertainment novelty, developed into a
pervasive communications medium, and rural areas outside the
reach of quality signals were again sidestepped. This time it
was by major broadcast networks and the cable TV industry.
As our story on page 14 relates, electric
co-ops (and in some cases their telephone co-op neighbors) combined
forces 20 years ago to develop and finance satellite TV service
through a new national organization. Brokering deals with program
providers, inking contracts with equipment manufacturers, and
successfully lobbying Congress to fight marketplace discrimination,
hundreds of co-ops backed by thousands of members secured the
service they sought. A few years later, as technology advanced,
they even helped rocket new, more powerful satellites into orbit
and have continued pursuit of modern telecommunications for
rural America.
Each October, we celebrate cooperatives’
continuing ability to marshal the strength of many stakeholders.
You might say when it comes to meeting consumers’ needs,
we’ve “got each other’s back.”
If you enjoy a bracing hike or a refreshing
swim in one of Wisconsin’s beautiful parks, chances are
your dog would like to go along! Fortunately, with just a bit
of research, you can find a nearby state park, trail, or recreation
area that not only tolerates canine companions, but also actually
welcomes them.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which manages
our state parks, tells us that responsible pet owners and their
pets are welcome in most of our parks. Pets are permitted in
most campgrounds, trails, roads, and outlying areas of the parks.
Additionally, some parks are singled out as areas that especially
cater to our four-legged friends. These areas may let you hike
with your dog, picnic with it, train it, and even swim with
it. Each has its own rules, so check before you go.
The Chippewa Moraine State Recreation Area permits dogs either
off or on leash, except for the picnic area. Pattison State
Park allows dogs on several trails, both long and short, and
welcomes them at both Big Falls and Little Falls picnic areas.
If your furry buddy likes to swim, he’ll find pet swim
areas at Governor Nelson, Kohler–Andrae, Lake Kegonsa,
and Whitefish Dunes state parks. A couple of these beaches feature
piers, so you can teach pets to jump in the water. For a swim
followed by a handy picnic, try Governor Dodge and High Cliff
state parks.
If you’re looking for space to train your pet, you’ll
fine that Kettle Moraine State Forest (Northern Unit) offers
a wet dog training area where dogs can be trained in water skills
and a dry dog training area where dogs can practice upland bird
skills. The Richard Bong State Recreation Area has a designated
area for teaching dogs to retrieve, point, flush, or track game
for the purpose of hunting or dog trial competition. A license
is required to train if live ammunition or live birds are used.
One can also train sled dogs, train falcons, ride horseback
on the trails, and hunt in season at Richard Bong.
Of course, there are rules. Pets are not allowed in buildings,
picnic shelters, beaches (except those designated “dogs
allowed”), playgrounds, observation towers, groomed ski
trails, and “pet-free areas.” A very few parks prohibit
dogs entirely. Pets must be on a leash (except swimming) and
must be under control. And, of course, it’s up to you
to dispose of waste properly.
To go farther afield with Fido, share the
trails at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and the St.
Croix National Scenic Riverway. Before a coming road trip, check
out pet-welcoming parks throughout the United States and Canada.
For your next outdoor outing—perhaps
to amble through the woods admiring the scarlet and bronze leaves
and, later, to savor a perfectly grilled hamburger or hotdog—be
sure to include Rover. He’ll be thrilled to gambol with
you instead of turning into a lonely couch potato at home.—Linda
Hilton
