Below is an excerpt from an article published by The Daily Evergreen:

The Maasai of Eastern Africa are a nomadic tribe of cattle-herders who rely on access to dependable water sources to survive.

However, the Maasai, like many residents of the Third World, are facing a growing global problem – a lack of safe drinking water. More than 8,000 miles away, a small group of students from the University of Idaho is trying to make a difference.

Five UI students departed to Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday to begin testing months’ worth of work of designing and redesigning methods of water filtration and storage. For the past six months, the students, along with seven others, worked on the project for the Maasai people. The projects, Clearwater-Aid and H2Oasis, are a part of a senior engineering requirement at UI.

“The basic idea is to remove what’s hazardous in the water so it’s fit for human consumption,” said Donald Elger, a UI mechanical engineering professor and adviser for Clearwater-Aid and H2Oasis.

“One in five people in the world don’t have safe drinking water.” According to a report by the United Nation’s Global Environmental Monitoring System, 5 million people, mostly children and infants, die annually from water-borne diseases.

“The issue isn’t getting any better,” said Gregory Contreras, a UI mechanical engineering major, U.S. Navy reservist and member of Clearwater-Aid. “The quality of water is just not there.” The two teams will test a variety of water treatment methods in Kenya, all of which the students engineered from conception to design, Contreras said.

The Clearwater-Aid project is in its second phase. This year’s team expanded on previous designs that were tested in Kenya during the project’s first phase in February 2006.

The purpose of the new prototypes is to reduce turbidity, or muddiness, in the water and remove the harmful biological material that can lead to illness, Elger said.

The designs use modern technology and local native materials to make the filters portable and easy to use for the nomadic Maasai tribe, Contreras said.

In one prototype the team uses a car battery to power ultraviolet lights to remove biological agents in the water, Contreras said. The entire system uses 10 feet of pipe, he said.

Another design uses layers of sand to kill harmful bacteria in water that seeps through it, Elger said. The Maasai will be able to install these sand filters into gourds – a fruit available locally – to make portable filters, he said.

The team also uses a local Maasai resource that is not made, but grown.

Seeds from the plentiful Moringa oleifera tree cause a natural charge that kills bacteria in water, Contreras said. The Maasai can use the seeds to help purify drinking water, he said.

H2Oasis team members are approaching the water crisis from a different angle. Instead of focusing on filtration, the team is constructing a catchment pond, or reservoir, to retain a water source for the Maasai during the dry season.

The H2Oasis project is in the preliminary stages of development, so team members are focused on testing the project to see how feasible it is for more installation, said Nicholas Mendenhall, a UI mechanical engineering major on the Clearwater-Aid team.

[…]

“It’s about wanting to help people,” he [Nicholas Mendenhall] said.

[…]

“All of us have a passion for doing good things,” Contreras said. “This is ours.”