New way to purify water
There was also a second of group students on this trip to Belize; those from the business program. Those business students came under a project called the Life Straw Project. Professor Wayne Yerxa told us what the Life Straw Project is about.
Professor Wayne Yerxa
I’ve been coming to Belize since 1988 and the University has been sending students down in various courses over those years and we come because it is a tremendous opportunity to be here. We love Belize, Belize has welcoming and beautiful people and we have various things that we work on. Currently, there are some people here in Education and Technology. My particular group is doing some projects at some of the schools out west here, encouraging savings on the part of the school children and also we have another project called Life Straws and we distribute those down in the Toledo District. The idea for distributing Life Straws was actually the idea of Scott Hilbert from a student organization called Students in Free Enterprise and he came up with the idea a couple years ago. We did some research on it and last year we started to distribute the straws in the spring in March and also we came down to check up on things in May and we have distributed them in Crique Juteh and also in Pablo Viejo in the Toldeo District. Our goal is to especially target the school age children and provide safe drinking water for them through the Life Straw.
One of the business management students, Scott Hilbert, spoke more on how the life straw works to purify water.
Scott Hilbert
The Life Straw is a device that is used to purify water. The way the Life Straw works is that it is simply a straw that you carry around with you. This is actually what it looks like and you are able to take this straw and wherever there is water that is not salt water, you can filter it and you can drink through the straw and it provides clean excessive water. One of the cool features with the Life Straw is that it filters 99.999% of water borne illnesses that comes from water. The Life Straw costs about sixteen dollars BZE to get it into the country, but we fundraised in the United States and we were able to sell them for a subsidized price, between three and four dollars and the reason that we sell them in the Toledo District is because people tend to support them what they help to create. So we don’t want to come down here and give away the Life Straws because that won’t help anyone, but if we come down here and we sell them, then people are able to have a sense of ownership with the Life Straws and they will be able to use them because they made the purchase to better of themselves.
The group gave us a short demonstration of exactly how that works.
Scott Hilbert
This is a demonstration of how the Life Straw actually works. As you can see this is actually clean and purified water, so it is good to drink. However, how it works is - we will take some dirt and put it in this water and then this is how the Life Straw works – you put the straw in the water and then you just drink it like that. Let me show you how to clean it. Once a day, all you have to do is take a drink and blow like that and that cleans the filter inside the Life Straw and allows you to drink for a full year with clean water.
The Life straw project is only the beginning of possibilities for this group as they say they have further projects planned for water purification. The group says they wish to build even more computer labs and get the Life Straw Project in more communities.
