The videoconferencing facilities at the MAGPI studios provided a direct visual link between the six classrooms

EWB’s Bob DeFillipo emphasized the importance of designing systems that can be built with local materials and easily maintained by village residents. His team built several latrines in a Rwandan village to provide basic sanitation and catchment containers to capture and store water for use during the dry season. Bob will return to Rwanda this winter to assess progress.

Children in a Rwandan village.

Moving the World toward Achieving Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation for All is the theme of the 2009 Global Passport to Clean Water program. This novel curriculum, developed by The Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center, MAGPI, and the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative will focus on a clean water and sanitation project in Rwanda.

This year students in grades eight through twelve at six schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and New Jersey have signed up. Over the next six months the students will investigate water-related projects and be introduced to the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals.

The project kicked off on October 27, with an interactive videoconference with students and teachers in the participating schools. Christiaan Morssink, President of the United Nations Association of Greater Philadelphia, opened the program with a discussion of the UN's Millennium Development Goal "To reduce by half the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by the year 2015." He also provided background information on the global water and sanitation crisis and UN projects currently underway.

Philip Chan, a second-year medical school student at Jefferson, and Bob DeFillipo, a hydro geologist with Aquaterra, Inc. and with Engineers without Borders, volunteer in Rwanda and described the rugged conditions and physical challenges of living in rural Africa. They showed slides of the people and the village they worked in.

Philip told the students about the need for medical care, nutrition and hygiene. Bob was a member of the team that designed and built systems for drinking water and repaired and replaced latrines.

• To prepare for the videoconference. Ellen Schultz, Education Programming Specialist, Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center, gave the students several assignments.
• One was to keep a diary of how they use water over the course of a day. How many gallons of water did they use? How might they use less water?
• Then Ellen asked the students to carry two gallons of water and imagine carrying that water several miles on mountain trails to bring it back to their homes.
• The third assignment showed students how stormwater run-off can contribute pollutants to our water supplies.

Students will also be introduced to ideas for raising public awareness and developing and implementing fundraising campaigns in their communities.

Craig Santoro, director of WHYY's Learning Lab, introduced Digital Storytelling. He's helping students with their final assignment - producing a short video or audio presentation on what they learned about the global water crisis, including a call to action for all who see their video.

The project will culminate with a live video conference for students in the Philadelphia area on World Water Day in March 2010. With help from translators and the videoconferencing facilities at the MAGPI offices, the plan is to connect students in this program with other high school students in Rwanda.

Ellen allowed that the assignments might seem daunting and that the chance of making a difference for people on the other side of the world might seem impossible. She assured the classes that it can be done. Students in last year's Global Passport program made a difference. Ellen showed the videos they produced to raise public awareness in their communities and shared some fund-raising ideas. One school made and sold bracelets and contributed the money they raised to underwrite the cost of building water systems in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The UN Millennium Development Goals are a set of eight global objectives aimed at improving the lives of the world's poorest people. The Goals, which cover a range of human development issues from providing universal primary education to halting the spread of HIV, were adopted at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit by 189 nations and have spurred unprecedented global efforts to help the world's poor. The MDGs, which are slated to be met by 2015, provide a framework for action throughout the United Nations system. Now beyond the half-way point, the MDGs have been met with uneven success.

 

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