Among the many health issues in today’s world, a prominent problem is lack of a fresh clean water supply for all who need drinking water. Water is a necessity of life, and through out all history from the Dark ages to now, people’s number one priority has been to ensure that they have a clean water source. People who live in countries like America are not connected with this primary requirement, they have water pumped to their faucets, and have trouble understanding the importance and the crisis of that people who don not have water go through.
Many people living in third world countries drink from filthy, polluted water. Not only is this unappealing, dinking dirty water is hazardous to health and wellbeing. Poor sanitation and unclean water can lead to Typhoid and paratyphoid enteric fevers, Cholera, HIV/AIDS, Malnutrition, Hepatitis, Ascariasis, Fluorosis, Schistosomiasis, and many other illnesses. Water.org states that 884 million people, one in eight people, do not have clean water. “3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease,” and that “Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.” The number of illness and parasites that can have their sources traced back to the simple mistake of drinking water that is not clean is astounding, horrifying, and should make one realize that there are bigger problem out their that are more important than the trivial things that many Americans often worry about. 
One of the countries that struggle with this problem is Chile. Northern Chile has one of the world’s driest deserts, the Atacama Desert, which has one of the lowest amounts of rainfall and some of the highest levels of solar radiation. The surrounding area has little clean water. The inhabitants have poor sources of fresh water and their quality of life suffers. In a family, the women and children often have to spend several hours a day collecting water from distant, polluted sources. When the women and children spend all their time finding water, they cannot devote their time to more important things like getting an education for the children or making sure that their family is healthy and well feed.
EK, GG, and I have decided for our senior year project to design and create a unit that will create fresh water for small villages that lack the funds or resources to create their own. Our project must be simple and clear; giving these people a confusing and complicated device would only make them uncomfortable with the unit, and probably lead to their distrust of effectiveness of the device. We want the unit to have a streamlined look and to give off a feeling of efficiency. Water is a basic need of all human beings, the fact that people die because they do not have clean water is inexcusable. 
You can find Erin and Gabrielle’s portions of the project at http://EK-SE2DesalinationUnit.blogspot.com/ and http://GG-SE2DesalinationUnit.blogspot.com/, respectively.
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