Happy Simply Home

By Carolyn Enting

Happy Simply Home
We talk to teacher and aid worker d’Arcy Lunn, a passionate participant in The End of Polio campaign, about buidling his Happy Simply sustainable homes.

The Global Poverty Project’s The End of Polio campaign (launched in 2011) supports the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) formed in 1988 by Rotary International, Centers for Disease Control, UNICEF, World Health Organisation, and since then joined by the Gates Foundation.

In January this year Lunn, at the request of the Gates Foundation, crossed the Tasman and set up camp in Wellington, New Zealand to raise awareness of The End of Polio campaign publicly, lobby politicians and invite Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully to represent New Zealand at the Summit. McCully did not attend but Lunn remains optimistic.  “We had a great response from the public and [the Government] know we exist and we’ll see where it goes in the future,” he says.

The past few years have been busy for Lunn, a school teacher from Adelaide, who joined The Global Poverty Project in 2009 shortly after returning from volunteer work in Ethiopia, and cycling around the South Island of New Zealand.

Last year, in addition to touring with Chandrasekhar, he also travelled to Canada where spent six months in Canada working closely with Rotary International and Rotarians on the polio campaign. While there he helped raise awareness of The Global Poverty Project by cycling 1000 miles from Oregon to Whistler while doing the Live The Below the Line challenge of living on $1.50 a day eating mostly oats and cold boiled potatoes.

This month [June 2013] Lunn heads to Atlanta, America for training with the Centers for Disease Control to contribute to the STOP (Stop the Transmission of Polio) program, after which he will be placed on assignment working in a polio affected country until December. Then he plans to return to New Zealand to live in the sustainable Happy Simply home he helped build this year as part of a community education project.

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