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POCATELLO - Americans are often in the front lines of volunteer missions around the world, helping the less fortunate in their struggle for adequate nutrition, subsistent health care and moderate housing.

The volunteers return home knowing they've helped, but the underlying problems that plague the citizens of many Third World countries continue to accrue.

Pocatellans Dr. Chad Fugate and Lynda Eggiman hope to be a small part of the efforts to change that.

Fugate, a nurse anesthetist, and Eggiman, a mortgage specialist, met recently to discuss one of the countries both have visited numerous times.

Fugate is the local coordinator of Ascend Alliance, a Salt Lake City-based humanitarian group that has ongoing missions in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Fugate has been deeply involved with Peru and is heading there in a few weeks on an oversight mission.

Eggiman has visited Peru approximately eight times. Her interest in the country blossomed from housing a Peruvian exchange student several years ago. Eggiman's favor was returned when she went to Peru to live with the student's family for two months. Her first visit was enough to make her fall in love with the country and its people.

By a series of coincidences, Eggiman and Fugate recently came together and have brainstormed what could be a new project to help citizens of Peru.

"Our focus is to go down and help them to help the people down there," Fugate said of Ascent's involvement. "It's actually assisting Andean people who want to help their own people."

The idea Eggiman pitched to Fugate fell squarely within the group's goal of helping people help themselves.

"The idea that Lynda came up with stems out of a kind of new concept in humanitarian work," Fugate said.

The idea involves using the same materials currently employed in building homes in Peru, but making the structures more cost efficient and safer. The structure is a dome, built of light rebar and covered with cement.

Eggiman's knowledge of the dome homes came by happenstance. Several months ago, she attended a work seminar and engaged in small talk with a Rexburg man, Wes Haws. She asked the man what he did for a living and he responded that he built the structures. He had just come back from building homes in Indonesia for victims of a typhoon that had ravaged the area. The money for the homes was contributed by Ascend Alliance.

Eggiman's interest was piqued. Four days later she went to the local Rotary club meeting. The speaker was Caroline Dailey, Ascend's director.

"There were too many pieces of the puzzle to let go of," she said.

In a happy coincidence, Fugate will be accompanied by architects to review some current programs in Peru. After speaking with Eggiman, the feasibility of the dome project will also be given some scrutiny.

The kicker is that the homes must be able to be constructed of pre-existing materials and be cost effective. Just as important, there must be a market for the structure and someone who is willing to nurture the business and keep it going.

"If they can't make a business out of it, it's hard to be self-sustaining," Fugate said.

Eggiman said that Haws, who had also built the homes in other parts of the world, noted that after building the relief homes, the volunteers departed.

"The money goes away when the project is done and everybody waits until there's another disaster," she said. "Our vision is to make a project that would bring entrepreneurism and capitalism to the emerging nations so that when we leave, businesses are left behind … that can continue on without our contribution of dollars."

Eggiman said Ascend already has a business training and mentorship program in place in Peru, which makes it an excellent choice for seeing if the dome house building business can become self-sufficient there. Ascend will provide the seed money on the project.

Eggiman hopes to find someone who can assist her in mentoring the program along with her.

"I'm the person holding all the pieces and all the networking and all the contacts to this project," she said. "I'm willing to do 99 percent, but I need someone with more experience and skills than I have."

Fugate said he will ask the architects in his upcoming visit to look into the feasibility of the program, along with reviewing current programs.

"My architect said, 'Great idea, but lets see if the people are capable of doing it.' I'm excited about going down with these architectural dudes and see what's going on and see what makes sense," he said.

"We don't want to go down and build a home … or even 50 homes and go 'whoop-dee-doo, look what we've done.' The whole idea is to make it self-sustaining, self-sufficient. One of those ways is training these people in enterprise.

"We've already had some great success in training these people in micro-enterprise … so that people with their businesses already are saying, 'Wow, how come I'm making 10 times as much?'"

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