Go Green

By John Sutter

Dawn Marks, of The Oklahoman, has an important story about the world water crisis, and how some students from Oklahoma Christian tried to help by traveling to Rwanda and filming a documentary.

The students said the amount of time people spend trying — and failing — to find clean water shocked them.

The students met a 14-year-old boy named Jean Bosco who made two to three trips a day, about a mile and a half each way, to gather water. He would haul containers, weighing half what he did, back to his home, where he cared for his four younger brothers while both of his parents worked ..

“It changes your perspective. You understand that (for) a lot of these problems there’s not an easy fix,” one student said.

Every day, 6,000 people — mostly children under 5 — die from diarrheal illnesses associated with poor water quality, according to the UN. A billion people on Earth don’t have access to safe drinking water. Four out of 10 people in the world don’t have access to simple latrines. Those statistics sound grim, but solutions are often as simple as helping communities install and pay for toilet systems. Local people have to have a stake in these projects, though. I’ve read stories about communities in Nepal, for instance, that are the recipients of toilets and water systems that break after several years — and local people don’t have the literal tools or engineering skills needed to fix them. There’s also a lot of research going on concerning water filters and simple devices that sanitize drinking water using the power of the sun. You can find some info on one example, a straw that filters water, here.