You saw the above picture in your email or in a social media post, and we asked if you knew what it was…
What you were seeing was a piece of this photo:
It’s a DIY water filter!
This photo was taken at our WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) training in Paulette, Haiti. Levenson, Bright Hope’s Haiti Operations Manager, was teaching the group how they could construct a sand charcoal filter to purify water.
In case you want to make one yourself ?, here’s what you’d need:
- Two containers (bottle, bucket, etc.)
- Knife
- Piece of clean cloth
- String
- Strainer
- Sand and pebbles
- Charcoal powder
Without giving you a complete step-by-step tutorial, here’s the gist of how it works.
You layer charcoal powder, sand and then pebbles on top of the cloth covering the opening of your upper bottle.
Pour the dirty water into the open container and as it trickles through the pebbles, sand, charcoal and fabric, it will filter out bigger objects, various bacteria, some chemicals, and bad tastes and smells.
Then boil the water to get rid of any remaining micro-particles, and you’re good to go!
The resulting water is scientifically proven safe to drink!
