1 · Position
Claude and Petra Graves moved to Sumba in 1989 and developed Nihiwatu between 1988 and 1994 living as their neighbours lived: no running water, no electricity, no clinic within a day’s walk. Both contracted malaria many times. In 2001 a guest, Sean Downs, read Claude’s twenty-year plan for a foundation and offered to help; the foundation was registered that year and the first water project began at Gallowatu.
2 · Why it is in the Library
It inverts the ordinary order. Most hotel foundations are built after the hotel succeeds, out of its surplus. Here the hotel was built as the instrument — the vehicle, in the founders’ own word — for work the founders had decided on first. Eighty wells and more than three hundred water stations now serve some 30,000 people in 200 villages; the malaria programme, begun in 2004 under Dr Claus Bogh, is credited with an 85 per cent reduction in cases on the island.
3 · The model
A non-profit and a for-profit working side by side, each with a distinct role in reducing poverty, has been copied across Indonesia and the Pacific. It is the clearest statement in the register of the proposition that a luxury house can be a means rather than an end.
4 · Candour
The reduction figures are the foundation’s own and are not independently audited here. The ownership of NIHI has changed since the Graveses — Chris Burch and James McBride bought and renamed it — and the foundation’s relationship to the house has changed with it. The Library records the founding model; whether the present owners sustain it is a separate question the entry does not answer.