Bintaro Lama

On Thursday last week, I went to Bintaro Lama with Mrs. Whiteley's class. Bintaro Lama is one of the many villages that WatSan Action helps. WatSan action is a company started by a student from JIS, that helps small villages get clean and fresh water.

The 1st station I went to was "water turbidity". There was a lady there who showed us how to check if water was clean using this tube. The tube had either a cross or a circle at the end of it. For the water to be clean, you had to fill the tube up and when you look down you should be able to see the cross or circle, if you couldn't that means the water is dirty.

The 2nd station I went to was the "sand filter". There we learned about how a sand filter was built and used. It was made up of 5 cm rough rocks, 10 cm fine rocks and 50 cm sand the other 30 cm was filled with water that had to be filtered. The water filter works by trapping all the bacteria and dirt in the fine sand the rocks are there just to make sure that the water is filtered enough.

The last station I went to was the "water disinfection". There was a lady there who went through the steps of disinfecting water with the sun. What shocked me the most was that during the rainy season the water might have to stay out for over 24 hours in the sun instead of the usual 6 hours.