Clean water

Two recent graduates of the undergraduate industrial design program have brought clean water to five eastern African villages. Then rising fourth-year student Jonathan Mills from Fredericksburg, Va.. heard about a group of villages In Africa that had no convenient source of clean water.

Mills got in touch with John Ywalasiwa, a village resident, and decided to raise the necessary funds to travel to Africa after his graduation from Virginia Tech to help. Mills told fellow fourth-year industrial design Sludent Howard Chen, from Richmond, Va., who also jumped at the chance to help.The villagers were walking about thirty minutes each way over hilly terrain to a clean water source to bring buckets of water back to their village.

In June 2007, during the African rainy season, with a combination of funds they collected (about $4,000 from family and friends; their major contributors were Ove and Elanor Green, parents of Associate Professor of Industrial Design Bill Green) and their own money, the two flew to the eastern African country of Kenya, and then traveled for more than a day by bus and truck.

Read the whole story, and more about service to Africa in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, on Virginia Tech News.