VOA常速英语:便携式马桶解决卫生问题

"My name is Jasmine Burton,and I’m originally from Atlanta Georgia.
I’m passionate about toilets,which is kind of a strange thing.
But I learned I was a freshman at Georgia Tech.
That nearly half the world doesn’t have access to hygienic sanitation.
And that disproportionately hinders the livelihoods of women and girls".
According to the World Health Organization,68 percent of the world’s population have only minimum access to basic sanitation.
Jasmine Burton decided she could do something to help solve this global sanitation problem.
Three years later,Wish for Wash was born.
Wish for Wash came out of a Georgia tech and design project.
It was an interdisciplinary class where designers and engineers work together to create a product.

And for us,it was the opportunity to create a modular toilet for a refugee camp in northern Kenya called Kakaako.
And from there we were invited to participate in the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize Competition,
which is the largest undergraduate invention competition in the U.S. We won".
The team’s toilet is called SafiChoo or clean toilet in Swahili.
"What I think is a novel about it.
It is the fact that it is modular.
So it is a sit toilet.
It can be used as a squat toilet.
It can be used as a compost toilet.
So it’s self-contained,
or it can have a component on the inside that makes it into a pour flush unit.
So you can, you know, pour your own amount of water,if you don’t have access to running water.
So the idea is it can be modular,and it can kind of meet the needs of the community based on where they are."
The company attracted the help of Tanvi Suresh
who designs consumer oriented products and is training volunteer students how to conduct research and development.
"So you need to actually understand like what the person wants.
That’s our whole Human Design Center thinking about.
Closing gauging different people of all ages and different skills,
and understanding sanitation something that they might not have thought a lot about in their prior experiences.
This $50.00 portable toilet is made from durable plastic material and has been tested in zambia for over a year.
SafiChoo is also being used by refugee farmer communities around the Atlanta region.
In some of these farming communities,our gardening communities, there’s kind of more remote.
So you know, people will have to walk, you know,10-15 minutes beyond kind of their farming area to go to the restroom
which encourages people to you know go to the bathroom in the woods
which leads to health problems,if you’re actually you know gardening or farming there.
And so it’s like if you have something that’s, you know,available on the property.
The community has expressed interest in it.
So that’s what we were helping."
The group raises money and awareness through merchandise and coloring books for children available on the Wish for Wash website.