Personal Research

This weekend I've been doing a lot of independent research for my essay portion of this project. I read a very intriguing article on the BBC website about the child soldiers of Sierra Leone partially from the point of view of a former solider. I found it very astounding the way young boys are taken from their families and trained to be such mindless killers. This is an excerpt from the article:
"If you don't fight to kill, whether anybody's coming, whether enemy or friend, if they kill you, they or your commander will leave your body there and go. That is why I defended myself. I killed a lot of people."
I couldn't believe how such madness, could so quickly be put into such a perspective. It was kill, or be killed. It makes me wonder how anyone could ever recover from such a traumatic event. Could someone ever refrain from violence after such an ordeal?

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4500358.stm

Developing a Prototype

This week one of my groups main focuses was to research Sierra Leone's problems with their water. What we found was truly horrifying. Despite the large number of rivers flowing through Sierra Leone, less than half of the people have access to water. I found this fact truly outrageous. People had been getting water from wells placed in each village, but when the civil war rolled around, the majority of them were destroyed. Many of the villages also do not have access to any type of latrine, so human waste is often the cause of many diseases (Malaria, Leptosporosis, Cholera, etc) spread through dirty water. As you can see, clean water is very space in most of Sierra Leone. A main cause of the clean water epidemic is the staggering amount of people living there. As of 2007 it was recorded that 6,144,562 people resided in Sierra Leone; a country just slightly bigger that West Virgina. There is simply just not enough clean water to go around.

Progress on water filter prototype:
At first my group wanted to make some sort of distiller for our product. We researched and found out that distillation is the act of boiling water, and then collecting and rapidly cooling the steam. This way all solids and all excess liquids are left behind. Personally, I thought that this method would by far be the most effective way to go. We envision powering our machine via crank, and though it sounds like a challenge we are willing to give it a shot.
Later on in the week we found out about a different prototype called the "Watercone"; and mechanism that lays out in the sun filled with water, and as the water evaporates, it collects on a plastic sheet and drains into a different bowl. This idea intrigued us and we decided to use the idea of using the sun as power, and are now working on creating a mix of the two prototypes to create a "Water Distiller Hybrid". Details are still to come.


Sources:
http://www.yale.edu/care/sierraleone/water.htm
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sl.html#People

Coming Soon.

:)