Worldwide statistics surrounding access to safe drinking water, hand-washing facilities and sanitation can be staggering.
According to the most recent statistics from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water services, 4.2 billion lack safe sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic facilities for hand-washing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 in 9 deaths among children worldwide are caused by diarrhea, a preventable and treatable condition.
Piney Point resident Isis Mejias holds a doctorate in environmental engineering from the University of Houston and from the University of Houston and has strived for more than a decade to provide children in developing countries with water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems.
“To really get health, we don’t only need clean water, but we need to have access to a toilet, proper drainage that takes the wastewater to a septic tank or wastewater treatment plant and adequate solid waste collection,” Mejias said. “And the third component in the WASH term is having access to hand-washing facilities with soap and the ability to clean the spaces where we live, the food that we eat and the kitchen utensils that we use.”
Mejias refers to WASH as the “holy trinity of health” because she says health cannot be achieved without every component present. Pathogen and disease transmission continues in an environment where one component is missing.
When Mejias began studying environmental engineering, she found that while people often focus on clean drinking water and fail to consider the need for sanitation and hygiene as well.
Although access to WASH impacts health, it also impacts less obvious areas of life like education, human rights and job opportunities.
Students in schools without restrooms or hand-washing facilities are more likely to miss school because they get sick more often from bacterial infections, for example. Mejias visited one Ugandan primary school where girls were forced to stay home for a week each month during their periods because there was no adequate place for them to change. Many of the girls drop out and never receive a secondary education, which limits their job opportunities compared to men.
Additionally, intestinal parasites caused by a lack of clean water or adequate sanitation can affect a child’s cognitive ability to learn and impact their future job opportunities after they drop out of school.
While these issues most often occur in communities far away from the United States, Mejias pointed to certain marginalized or minority communities right here in Texas whose schools don’t always have soap for their hand-washing facilities. This can expose students to infectious diseases like COVID-19.
During her time at UH, Mejias learned about Rotary International’s work in water and sanitation from Rotarian Bill Davis. Davis helped her raise $64,000 to establish a water distribution system at a Kenyan hospital. When Mejias traveled there, she realized she wanted to further pursue the environmental engineering field and started working toward her doctorate.
Davis urged Mejias to apply for the Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship, which is a program for graduate students researching in one of Rotary’s six areas of focus span that the organization’s wide range of volunteer projects. Through the scholarship, she researched low-cost water treatment technologies with bacteria resistant to metals from a contaminated river in Brazil.
Davis said working with Mejias has been a great experience.
“It has been an absolute pleasure working with Isis on WASH projects,” he said. “She is very dedicated, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and most importantly sees the project through to completion.”
After Mejias defended her thesis, she worked in Kenya and Uganda with Rotary projects. In Uganda, she assessed the WASH needs of 10 primary schools that had no water. A young Ugandan woman she met told her that just by being there and educating the communities, she was empowering many people to make changes in water, sanitation and hygiene.
“I realized that education was a very big role in my field or in my role as a WASH advocate,” Mejias explained. “And that’s why I decided to come back to Houston and open a nonprofit dedicated to water education.”
Global WASH is now a 501(c)(3) centered around empowering communities that had always lacked safe water through education that forges positive impacts. Also, through serving as a Rotary WASH Rag Ambassador, Mejias educates people about WASH and works to improve situations in communities around the globe.
She said awareness is a major key and that many people in the U.S. take safe, running water for granted. But she added the widespread Texas freeze in February 2021 that left many residents without water shed some light on the issue.
Mejias encourages people to be informed, spread the word about the importance of safe water, sanitation and hygiene, and financially support or get involved with organizations like Rotary International whose work aims to improve lives through WASH.
“I think if more people realize the connection between clean water and hygiene and the impacts of just education, job opportunities, prosperity, even gender equality, they’ll do more about it,” she said. “Anyone really can be a health advocate.”
For more information about Global Wash, visit www.globalwash.org. For more information about Rotary International’s work in WASH, visit https://tinyurl.com/39k65shj.
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