Hi everyone!
That was a lot of fun today. The girls had a chance to learn some science, some geography, and something about serving other people.
We talked about the importance of education, and how some children in other countries don't have it as easy as we do to go to school. The girls were impressed by the story of a man who traveled to Pakistan and helped remote mountain villages build schools.
They also heard some first-hand stories from Peace Corps workers in Africa and the trouble they had to get fresh water. They heard from people who got their water from collection buckets on their roofs, and people who had to wait by their houses to watch and see when the water turned on and then had to stay home to collect as much water as they could during the short times it was running. They even heard from people in areas where there was no running water at all and they had to bring all their household water home each day in buckets from tap holes in the ground.
Finally, we watched a movie ( http://www.peacecorps.gov/wws/videos/sol-soul/ ) about a project American students worked with alongside students in Cape Verde to develop solar stills to get the salt out of the ocean water that surrounds the country. (Some parts were higher concept so I narrated and explained what was going on.) They then built their own solar stills using bowls, cups, and saran wrap. They're pretty simple, so if they come apart, they should be repairable. They'll work best if you keep them in the sun, and we washed the glass clean water cups in the dishwasher before bringing them in so they're clean. The girls had all sorts of ideas of what water they'd like to purify, and it might be neat for them to experiment a bit. Some ideas I heard were using dirty snow, or putting salt water (just add table salt) in the big bowl to simulate the ocean water the people in Cape Verde were using.
A couple quick things about the solar stills though: 1) They're energy efficient, but they're not fast. So, if you set one in a sunbeam in the morning, there might not be much actually distilled by the time everyone gets back in the evening. 2) They're fantastic (unbeatable!) at getting pollutants that are dissolved or particulate in nature out of the water, and removing disease-carrying microorganisms--basically everything that doesn't evaporate. BUT , hydrocarbons or other low molecular weight liquid pollutants will distill alongside the water. So if the girls are getting snow to distill, don't take it from along a roadside where exhaust/oils/road runoff might be in the snow. And even in that case, it may be best to do an observation of the water in the cup compared to the dirt left behind in the bowl, rather than drinking the distilled water. If you use home water with salt in it to simulate distilling ocean water, then by all means, a taste-test might be the best way to prove that the distilled water has the salt out of it.
I have some cooking badges leftover too, so I must have missed someone. If your scout wasn't at either the Feb. 27th meeting or the Mar. 6th meeting, let me know, or if your scout didn't get her cooking badge at either of those meetings (you may have left before I got your badge to you!) let me know and I'll get that over to you.
Aleks Skibicki
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