Unsafe water problematic for Ecuadorians
Graduate student works to help eliminate parasites from water to improve quality
Nearly 5 million people die each year from water-related illness. Maritza Yanez, Riobamba, Ecuador graduate student is attempting to help solve that problem.
By Sarah Neff
Monday, August 13th, 2007
“Hacer camino al andar.”
In Spanish it means to make a path where you walk. Maritza Yanez, Riobamba, Ecuador, graduate student, lives by this motto. She wants to make a new path in water treatment for her people when she returns to Ecuador. Yanez has a passion for water.
“My dream is to help my people,” Yanez said.
Yanez came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship and with funding from the Los Pau Scholarship Program. Margaret Coffey, Yanez’ sponsored student advisor while she is at the Applied English Center, said Yanez has a very positive attitude and has really immersed herself in the American culture. Coffey said Yanez struggled with English when she first arrived, but she did her best to communicate.
“She’s really good at problem solving,” Coffey said. “When something doesn’t make sense to her she kind of just keeps working on it until she can get a solution that makes sense to her.”
Yanez spent most of her life analyzing water at a lab at the Escuela Superior Politecnica de Chimborazo, a University in Ecuador. She found that sometimes the water was safe, but more often it was not drinkable. Many times she would find parasites in the drinking water.
“The children are sick, they are tired, they are not healthy,” Yanez said. “When the children are unhealthy they can’t learn, they can’t study and they can’t improve. It’s so difficult there.”
The National Resources Defense Council estimated that two in five people in the world didn’t have access to safe drinking water. They also said nearly 5 million people died each year from water-related illnesses, and about 5,000 children died each day from drinking contaminated water.
When Yanez was working in the water analysis lab, she shared her results with the Ecuadorian people. She said they understood they were drinking bad water, but no one knew what to do about it. Yanez wrote papers and read many books on the subject, but still she could not bring together the organization and expertise needed to effectively treat the water.
Yanez chose to come to the United States to earn a master’s degree because all of the books she read were written here. All of the equipment used to test the water was made here. She said she wanted to learn about the culture and the organization of the United States.
“When something happens here, the people join quickly and help each other quickly,” Yanez said. “I would like to learn about that; how can I do that with my people?”
Yanez wants to get an internship at a water treatment facility before she returns to Ecuador. She said the real world experience would be a valuable addition to the theories she learned. More than anything, she wants to bring the technology back to Ecuador so that her country can enjoy the basic human right to clean drinking water.
“It’s so good when you see a child drinking drinkable water,” Yanez said. “You feel amazing. Sometimes people don’t understand that.”
— Edited by Trevan McGee
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