EDMONTON – It’s been nearly two years since a massive earthquake ravaged Haiti, but the residents of the impoverished country are still suffering the after-effects – perhaps the worst of which is the lack of clean drinking water. A group of Queen Elizabeth high school students is trying to change that, though.
“What we’re trying to do is put spotlight back on Haiti because ever since the earthquake happened there’s a lot of aid right off the bat and people just started forgetting about it, and there’s still a huge crisis over there,” says Bashir Mohamed, a grade 12 member of the Student Led Initiatives for Sustainable Education (SLICE) program. The group has students apply their education to real-world problem solving, and this year they’ve decided to help fix Haiti’s problem of contaminated water by raising money to send them 1,000 LifeStraws, each of which cost $5.50.
On Wednesday, Mohamed was one of the students who demonstrated how the straws work, slurping up brown, murky water through the personal filtration tube, which turned the dirty water into clean h20.
“It tastes like normal water, a bit sandy and all that, but it tastes normal and clean. It doesn’t taste bad at all,” says Mohamed.
Fellow grade 12 SLICE member, Cayley East, adds that the best thing about the LifeStraw is that there’s nothing technical about it. Haitians will be able to use the device just like a normal straw to filter out not only dirt and grass particles from their water, but also water-borne illnesses – an issue SLICE Club teacher, Aaron Dublenko, saw first-hand.
“I had an opportunity to go and travel there but was kind of nervous with civil unrest and, of course, cholera. So that started bringing our attention to access of clean water and to the fact that a lot of families are sick and can’t do much from drinking and getting cholera and other waterborne sickness from contaminants.”
The group is still raising money for the 1,000 LifeStraws, and hoping to send them to Haiti by the end of January.
“If we can just make a little difference, give a child over there a life straw to carry around, that would be great,” says Mohamed.
If you’d like to help the group with their fundraising initiative, you can contact Aaron Dublenko at 780-476-8671.
With files from Shane Jones, Global News
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