Clean Water For BO Kluea Admission Essay Example

One particular experience I’ve had that really gave me the chance to work closely with an ethnic community was on my Senior Design project at Drexel University. The project was called “BioSand Filter for Clean Water” and was based on Bo Kluea, Thailand, a place identified by the World Health Organization to have limited access to clean water.
The advisor chose me to be part of this project because I am Thai. While it is true that I was born and raised in Thailand, being in Bo Kluea was a much different experience than growing up in Bangkok. Bo Kluea is a rather small uncharted mountain village located in the Nan Province of Northern Thailand. The families lived traditionally making a living though family salt wells.
Moreover, language still posed a problem, even for me, because the people of Bo Kluea spoke a dialect of their own. To prepare for this, I watched their local movies, played with subtitles, so that I can understand and participate in daily life conversations. This language barrier, coupled with a traditional way of life, made it difficult for them to understand the importance of water. While they were welcoming and hospitable, they weren't very accepting of the new technology that we were trying to introduce to them. We were put in a situation where the people would accept mostly any kind of aid, except water. They would much rather receive other forms of aid such as money, food and clothing.
This became a challenge bigger than the entire team expected. However, I saw this as a great learning opportunity. Through it, I saw very clearly that there are all different people in the world and that we have our own different views and different ideas about different things. It could be so that I am imagining myself to be right and that my ideas are the end and all of a subject but I know now for certain that such can't always be true. I learned to be considerate and learned to always try looking at things through the lens of other people's eyes. I learned to be open to the views and ideas of other people. Initially, we were under the impression that these people would readily accept our project. However, we learned that these people have their own ideas of what they think would help them best based on their present circumstances. While we can't force our own ideas on them and they can't demand from us what we didn't come to build, we could only try to understand each other. And that's exactly what we did.
As Communication Manager, it was my job to make this people understand the importance of potable water and how our water filters could help them. In order to reach the people of Bo Kluea, we traveled to each village with our BioSand filter prototype and a water testing kit demonstrating to the people the poor quality of their water and showing them that, through the filter, they can be enabled to have better access to clean and potable water and that this can help improve their health.
It wasn't easy, but it helped that the people didn't completely reject the technology from the outset. Thus, after seeing the test results, people started gaining interest in the BioSand filter. A few months later, we learned that this interest from the few people turned into something bigger as we received an update from our advisor informing us that some villages has started using the BioSand filter. While we didn't manage to get through to all of them, a few villages is certainly a good start.