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It's More Than a Well debuts Thursday on BTN
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Illinois students are helping bring safe drinking water to villages in Nigeria
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Jan. 7, 2009
Champaign, Ill. - The Big Ten Network not only features the latest sports news, features, and live coverage, it includes timely and provocative programs on University of Illinois academic endeavors. The latest installment, It's More Than a Well , premieres Thursday, Jan. 8 at 3:30 pm on the network.
The program chronicles the experiences of six University of Illinois students who are members of the international group "Engineers Without Borders" during the summer of 2008 in the village of Adu Achi, Nigeria. Over 50 percent of the people in Nigeria live without running water. Women and children Adu Achi walk for hours each day to collect water from a contaminated stream three kilometers away. But thanks to this group of Illinois students this is about to change.
For some team members, it was their third trip there in an effort to build a safe drinking water system for the community. This time the group traveled with a high definition camera provided by Illinois' College of Engineering. With camera in hand, the students documented the challenges and daily life in a place so far from home.
In the documentary, the students reflect on the warm welcome they received in the village and the long hours of labor at the work site. They faced ongoing struggles to get supplies in a country with little infrastructure. Faculty Advisor Bruce Litchfield says the trip "was an outstanding opportunity to field test the student's classroom knowledge of engineering and to help people in need." Several students said it the trip was the fulfillment of a long time goal to work in a developing country.
Illinois Engineers without Borders students worked closely with the community of Adu Achi to create a vision for the design of the new water system. Students and villagers worked side by side building cement water holding tanks, digging trenches and laying pipe for the new water system. Although team members returned to Illinois at the end of the summer, the village continues to work on the project with input from the students. The goal is for the water system to be operational in the spring of 2009.
It's More than a Well is a co-production of the Big Ten Network, the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics and the University of Illinois Office of Public Affairs.
