SIFAT preparing team for tsunami relief

To paraphrase an old saying, if you give a man a bottle of purified water, you can quench his thirst for a day. If you teach a man to purify water, you can quench his thirst for the rest of his life.

Teaching water purification methods to tsunami-ravaged victims will be the goal of a three-person team being sent to the southern coast of India later this month from the Servants in Faith and Technology (SIFAT) base in western Randolph County.

The team will leave on March 31 and spend the next two weeks traveling to villages around the southern tip of India to help inform the people there about some surprisingly simple ways to purify their drinking water.

Kathy Bryson will be a member of the team, and she said that one of the purification methods that they will teach the people requires nothing more than a plastic bottle and a sunny day.

“If you leave a clear plastic bottle of water out in the sun for about two hours, the UV rays from the sunlight will kill about 98 percent of the contaminants in that water,” she said.

She says this simple method is a legitimate alternative to boiling the water, which is one of the most reliable forms of purification. A great number of the people that the team will encounter will be limited by their financial resources and unable to buy wood or fuel for fires to heat the water to its boiling point.

“This is a way for those people to be able to use what little money they have for food and other important items,” said Bryson.

The SIFAT team will also work to inform mothers of young children how to keep their children hydrated in the face of an unclean water supply. Bryson said that children under the age of 5 are the hardest hit by unclean water.

For larger groups and villages, the team will teach a purification method that uses a car battery and sodium chloride, or common table salt. Through use of a specifically-designed device, the electric current from the battery will separate the chlorine from the sodium in the salt. Chlorine is a common water purification element that is most commonly used here in swimming pools.

Bryson said this method, although more expensive at $400 per device, can provide clean water for as many as 10,000 people per day.

The SIFAT team will return to the United States on April 16.