By Laura Noonan | Irish Independent

For David McKernan, it all began with a trip to Ethiopia in 2005. The boss of the coffee chain Java Republic demanded that his hosts take him to the remote region where the country’s best coffee is located.

But this part of Africa proved to be grittier than anything the businessman had imagined. “The place was a kip,” says David. “I’ve been to other places in the Third World, but I’d never seen anything like the poverty of Ethiopia.”

The horror of his surroundings, and the stark contrast with the Celtic Tiger grandeur back home, stirred something in the Malahide-based entrepreneur. “We were sitting around a fire one night, and I said ‘I want to build a school’ — I wanted it for my ego,” recalls David, who founded Java Republic in 1999 after a stint with the Campbell Bewley Group.

With a throng of restaurateurs and colleagues in tow, David approached the elders of the Illili Daratu village in the Ethiopian coffee region of Harar. “We asked them what they wanted, expecting them to say a school,” he recalls.

“They asked for water and we all sat there looking at each other like eejits.”

The elders explained that locals faced a 12-hour round trip to get fresh water, only to end up with something that “looked like tea and tasted like shit”.

Dumbstruck though he was, McKernan vowed to make the water project happen.

Ken Healy, the owner/manager of Barberstown Castle, Co Kildare, was on the Ethiopian trip too and offered to lay on a spread at his hotel for a fundraiser. “In one night we made €140,000,” David recalls. “It was a Celtic Tiger night. In the auction alone we made €70,000.”

Another €30,000 in donations came in over the coming months, but McKernan had a problem — working out how to translate the money into fresh water for Illili Daratu. “The money sat in an account for about 18 months,” he admits. “We couldn’t give it to local people because it would have been stolen. Even if we’d given it to the government water agency, there’s a fair chance that chunks of the money would have gone missing.”

Accepting his own limitations, David decided to develop the water project in partnership with Plan Ireland, an Irish Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that has offices in 48 developing countries. The money was handed over and a local Plan Ireland worker began sending regular updates on the project’s progress.

By January, David was so enthused by what he was told that he travelled back to Illili Daratu, expecting to see people celebrating in the streets of his coffee village.

But McKernan’s recent visit turned into a series of shocks that left the coffee boss disillusioned and despairing.

The first blow was the realisation that his beloved coffee region had changed beyond recognition. The endless fields of coffee plantations he remembered had been almost entirely replaced by acre after acre of a shrub that produces Chat, a high-inducing amphetamine and cathine that’s illegal in many developed countries.

Easier to produce and up to four times more lucrative than coffee, Chat had become the region’s new “cash crop”.

As well as devastating the region’s coffee production, Chat had become the local pastime of choice in Harar, and McKernan observed that “most of the men sat out of the sun and chewed their way through the leaf from noon until evening”.

The drug triggered breakouts of “crazed, aggressive and somewhat psychotic behaviour” and the long-term health dangers are unknown, but that didn’t stop the locals letting young boys join in.

“If I lived in the same squalor I may very well chew the Chat all day, but what makes me so angry is the encouragement of young boys to chew Chat — that’s unforgivable,” fumes David, himself a father of three.

He is also afraid that the conversion to Chat will see the farmers being exploited and eventually losing their lands to “narcotic criminals and gangsters”.

“The kids will be so addicted to the Chat, they probably won’t care,” he says, adding that the situation left him with “little hope for these people and little sympathy for the path they have chosen”.

Trekking deeper into the Harar to the village of Illili Daratu did little to improve his mood. “I expected there to be free flowing water in the village, I thought they’d all be celebrating,” McKernan says.

“I knew the minute I landed that it wasn’t going to be like that.

“There was no sense of celebration; we weren’t treated the way we were the first time we came — we were just another gang of white coffee guys.”

McKernan quickly discovered the root of the villagers’ apathy. His free-flowing water was 5km from the town, and getting it the rest of the way was going to cost another €200,000 — money the village hadn’t got.

“It wasn’t that they (the people sending the reports) lied to me, I just think the way I think — you start a project and you get it done,” he says. “We were just shocked (by how much was left to do).”

Plan Ireland boss David Dalton says the delays stemmed from the complexity of the project and the extreme remoteness of the village, which had no NGO infrastructure, no electricity and no water.

Before construction began, Plan Ireland engaged in “prolonged negotiation” with local authorities to make sure they would maintain the well once it was up and running.

“There’s no way you would go ahead with a project like this without making sure someone was going to look after it when it was finished,” says Dalton. “If getting that takes six or 12 months, it takes six or 12 months.”

Once the local authorities came on board, a feasibility study was carried out which showed the nearest water was 7km from the village, and even then it was 122m down so it was “no joke pumping it”.

The work was put out to tender among local contractors, and Plan Ireland has a full-time consultant engineer on site overseeing progress.

While Dalton admits the project is a “little bit slower” than he’d have hoped for, he insists it’s “going according to plan” with the delays typical of those you’d expect doing such a big project in such a remote area.

After three years on this project, Dalton hopes Plan Ireland will stay involved in the region once it’s done, building programmes that will help the village develop.

“When they have water there’ll be a lot more they can do,” he says.

Without the benefit of David Dalton’s lengthy experience on development projects, David McKernan’s initial response was to get “very annoyed” with himself and brand the whole project a “waste of time” when he saw the apparent lack of progress.

But he’s now back in Ireland, determined to raise another €200,000 from Java Republic’s customers to finish the ‘disaster” of a project, hopefully by 2011.

He feels no burden of pressure from the donors who’ve already given him €170,000 — “they gave me the money, I promised I’d spend it right and I will” — but the experience has clearly marked him.

“I don’t regret it, there’s something about Ethiopia that gets under your skin, and we will finish the water project,” he says.

“But I will never, ever get myself into making a promise to a village again and leaving myself wide open by not delivering on something I said I’d do.”