World Clean Water Day goes campus-wide and raises $1,700

Andrew Glass and Janel Shoun  | 

In America, it is so easy to take available, clean water for granted.

Three years ago, while studying the African nations, Rita Cochrane’s seventh-grade class decided it was time for David Lipscomb Campus School to take at least one day each year to acknowledge how blessed we are to have clean water available at any time on any day.

So Cochrane established World Clean Water Day at DLCS based on an idea from a Starbucks fundraiser for the same cause. On that dauy students are asked to drink water and donate the money they would have spent on a Coke or juice to a mission project designed to bring fresh, clean water to the poor in other countries.

The collection has been a big hit in grades K-12 for the last two years, collecting between $700-$1,000 for the annual Lipscomb University engineering missions to Latin America.

This year, World Clean Water Day went campus-wide on March 28, with university students, faculty and staff also donating funds in exchange for a bottle of water. This year’s collection raked in the largest total ever, $1,700 destined for two engineering mission trips to Guatemala and Honduras.

Fred Gilliam, chair of the Lipscomb engineering department, has made it his students’ business to provide clean water for those who cannot attain it. In past years, World Clean Water Day has helped to fund Lipscomb engineering student teams building a rain collection system and water purification plant in La Fortuna, Guatemala and a water tower to supply running water to a medical clinic in Las Delicias, Honduras.

This year, the engineering department decided to break the group up into two separate trips: One group of 22 students will return to Honduras and another group of 12 students will go to Guatemala.

The students headed to Guatemala will provide drastic improvements to the water system of a mountain village called La Florida, located on the site of a coffee plantation that went bankrupt a few years ago. The downfall of the plantation left no pension for its employees, but the government gave them the land instead, Gilliam told Lipscomb campus school students in chapel.

The village sits at the top of a hill and the only water source, a natural spring, is at the bottom of the hill. Gilliam’s crew will construct a solar-powered pump at the bottom of the hill that will pump water to the top of the hill and into a tank. This tank will filter the water and then allow the nearly 50 residents and families to dig a ditch for a pipe that will pump the water directly into their homes.

The $1,700 raised this year by the Lipscomb family will fund the purchase of the solar cell array and the pump, Gilliam said, leaving only the storage tank and pipes to be funded.

The other 2008 mission trip will send engineering students to Mission Lazarus in Honduras. Mission Lazarus, a 1,200-acre orphanage in the southeast area of the country, will get a new computer lab installed, a radio tower and initial work on a bridge for vehicles and cows.