water purification SODIS

You have to boil the water in Peru in order to kill the parasites, viruses and bacteria that call it home before you can drink it. I'm lucky that the town where I live, Rinconada Llicuar chlorinates the water at the well, but you still have to purify it before drinking because the water system is not that well maintained and we only have water for 3 hours every other day. People fill up big trash cans, buckets, pots and all kinds of stuff in their houses to keep their water and after sitting around in trash cans for a couple of days new little microbes start living there. So bottom line: you get diarrhea unless you purify the water so some people boil their water before drinking it and many others just have diarrhea all the time.

In Peace Corps training they taught us this cool way to purify water called SODIS. Basically these Swiss scientists discovered that UV-A rays from the sun, the ones that burn your skin, also kill micro-organisms that cause diarrhea. This is very cool because you do not need to burn fuel i.e. wood or gas to purify the water, a fabulous benefit because fuel is expensive for people, not to mention that the smoke is not the best for respiratory health.

Basically, you put the water in clean, unscratched plastic bottles and leave them in full sun for 6 hours. Then all the little heebi-jeebies will die and ¨Poof!¨ no diarrhea for you. I have been using SODIS on my water for about a month now and so far so good. I have no more diarrhea than I had when I was drinking bottles water that I bought from the market. I mean I still have diarrhea but, I don't think it's the water. I think it's the food. Well, actually I think it's that the vegetables, and dishes are all washed with un-purified water and sometimes I eat off wet dishes and cook with wet veggies. Not ideal, but here we are. Poco a poco.

I'm excited because at first I was skeptical that this SODIS thing would work. I really think it works! I mean they're not quacks at the NGO or anything it's a big international non-governmental organization but still, I was suspicious. Now that I've tested it on myself I think I might take the show on the road and do some classes about it in my town. Apparently, in both Honduras and Bolivia the Ministries of Health promote this method of water purification. It's great for very poor communities because they can often find plastic bottles, but they don't have a lot of money for fuel and sometimes see boiling water as an expense that they can forgo.

http://www.sodis.ch/