First, some background on safe water.
Here in the US, we enjoy the fruits of technology that give us a pretty good standard of living. Access to clean water, sanitation, and energy have become an everyday thing that much of the world lives without. Access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene can transform lives. Globally, 663 million people live without easy access to clean water and 2.4 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities. (UNICEF). The water they work so hard to collect is often contaminated and without the knowledge and skills for proper water purification and storage, can lead to their families getting sick with waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. The past President of the World Health Organization has said that the profession that helps world health the most is Engineering. (National Engineering Week is coming up in February, so hug your favorite engineer) This is no way denigrates the health profession, it’s just easier to prevent disease than treat it. I think one of the traditions of the Church that doesn’t get much attention is the Incarnational Tradition. Using our skills to help people is “giving a cup of cold water” in many instances.
Our youth group became involved in NewLife International several years back. Once or twice a year the youth would go down to Scottsburg IN for a combination retreat and volunteer weekend. NewLife was started by Duvon McGuire who designed a device that can chlorinate and disinfect water from common salt. These devices were assembled by volunteers (such as our youth) and then sent all over the world for applications from bush villages to field hospitals. (see https://www.waterfortheworld.org) During one of the visits, Duvon was struggling to get some controls to operate for their purifiers. The devices they had were expensive and unreliable. We were able to help and developed a controller that was inexpensive and reliable. This new algorithm was presented at the 2014 GHTC (Global Humanitarian Technical Conference) , and the UMW at FUMC sponsored building 10 of these units that the youth built and presented to NewLife. All of these are still in use, some went to Tibet, and there are some that went to a hospital in Tanzania. This basic design has since been incorporated in newer designs,
Fast forward to today. The Purdue Polytech school in Anderson requires their Senior students to have a capstone project. NewLife submitted a proposal for a “Lite” version of their new controller to keep the cost down for systems that don’t need much complexity. There is a team of three students that are working on this. Although it was not presented as a project that FUMC was affiliated with, the team recognized the role FUMC has played in making these purifiers a viable tool for providing safe water in a reliable way. FUMC may have a chance to be involved in the next generation of these water purifiers.
And it doesn’t stop there. The FUMC UMW graciously sent Marisa Childs to the GHTC conference last October. Stay tuned for what she has to say about ways to help the world.
So we are a people dedicated to helping wherever we can, wether it is cleaning tables for Community Cafe or developing Coulombic Chemical Algorithms, we can all be a blessing somehow. -Dave Peter
