Sarah Brownell This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. NewsHaiti.com - Haiti Daily News

   www.newshaiti.com/index.php?mo - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/27/2003   Last Visited: 1/22/2004

   Sarah Brownell of Rochester, NY spent months earlier this year in a remote corner of Haiti, installing and demonstrating low-tech remedies for safe drinking water and reliable sanitary systems.
   
   So it was a little jarring this weekend for her to set up a water purification system in her professor's Brighton driveway.
   
   The rig - a ferroconcrete trough, metal tube and spigot - is designed to cheaply disinfect water using ultraviolet radiation.
   ...
   Brownell, a 1998 RIT graduate and veteran of water purification projects in Cambodia, in the past three years has concentrated on Borgne, a coastal village in northwest Haiti.
   
   While there this year, Brownell - now an RIT consultant - set up a " technology center" for Haiti Outreach Pwoje Espwa (" Project Hope," in Creole). Open on market days, the center included displays of the water disinfection system, solar cooking ovens, generators rigged to bicycles and other devices to make life safer and easier.
   
   Brownell, 28, with a master's degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, said simple technologies also have a future in the United States.
   
   UVC ultraviolet light, within what scientists call the " germicidal bandwidth" of light, is catching on as a drinking water disinfectant, she said. It eliminates the need for storing bomb-like quantities of chlorine - a potential terrorist target - and eliminates possibly carcinogenic byproducts of chlorine breakdown.
   
   And some day, everyone in the United States will be switched to dry toilets, said Brownell. " It doesn't make any sense to go to the bathroom in water we've paid to treat," she said.
   
   Larsen is encouraging Brownell to take streamlined American technology to poor countries - and to bring back home the reuse-and-recycle ethic that places like Haiti embrace, out of necessity.
   ...
   " When I go down (to Haiti), I don't feel like I know everything," said Brownell, who will be in Borgne again before the year is out. In Creole, she said, the technology center is called " the idea exchange."
   
   At Cornell this week, Brownell will be on a panel examining the technical and social challenges of clean-water systems in Third World countries. She will also display the water disinfection unit assembled in Larsen's Brighton driveway.