On April 19th we had a Google hang out with a student from NYU, Karishma Bhagani. Karishma grew up in Kenya and experienced the issues going on in Kenya and decided to dedicate time to make a change. She has made a water purifier to make the drinking water in third world country’s like Kenya cleaner and safer to consume.  Being able to watch and experience this Google hang out was really cool and inspirational, just hearing about what Karishma has done really inspires me to do something good for the world.

As a class and a community our goal is to come together and make a difference. Our first step in reaching out goal is to spread awareness of the issue at hand and the filter that Karishma has constructed.

I would love to contribute to Karishma’s project. My personal goal is to get in touch with Karishma via email and help construct a website to raise awareness.

Some of the questions we asked involved furthering the technology in the water purifier, such as making a filter that makes ocean water consumable. She explained to us that there is something out that will filter out ocean water but is takes far to much electricity and money to use at this point down in Kenya; she is working on expanding the project to make that dream of an efficient and affordable ocean filter come true.

We asked Karishma about her inspiration for this project. She grew up in Kenya and knew the problems they were having. In middle school she was assigned a passion project and she decided to do it on Kenya. When she got into high school she made a decision to grow on this project and make it a reality to help save life’s in Kenya.  He plan from here is to keep her product growing and eventually make it so everyone in need of clean water world wide will have access.

Another question was,”what were some problems that you faced making this project?”   Some of Karishma’s designs were flawed and had aspects that made the water contain bacteria. She tried chlorine in her filter but it was not successful as it did not completely clean the water. In the end she found that a vegetable called drumsticks worked to clean the water.

In this picture Emily S was asking a question about the challenges that Karishma had faced through out her project.