World Water Day: Getting clean water from Humber College to Syria
Students at Humber College had the chance on Wednesday to help Syrians living without clean water or basic supplies.
In honour of World Water Day, the students helped Canadian charity Globalmedic package almost 2,000 family emergency kits.
"What goes inside each kit are hygiene items, and most importantly, water purification sachets. These kits are going to be packed and then sent to Turkey and across the border to Syria," explained Rahul Singh, the all-volunteer charity's executive director.
Singh hoped the event would remind students and Torontonians more broadly just how important access to water is.
"As a Torontonian, if you want to drink water you go to your tap, and you don't really understand the water that two billion people in the world have is unsafe and it kills their kids and makes people ill," he said.
Many of the student participants are studying international development, and James Cullin, associate dean at Humber, described it as a good opportunity for them to put the theory they've learned into practice.
"[It] brings them closer to the kind of work they want to be doing after they graduate," he said.
Globalmedic a finalist in Google's global impact challenge
Globalmedic, a nearly 20-year-old charity that runs medical aid missions around the world, was recently named a finalist in a global impact challenge run by Google.org, Google's philanthropic branch.
They were nominated for their drone program, in which drones are flown over disaster areas to support search-and-rescue missions.
"We come in with pretty high-end Canadian-made drones and we take hundreds of thousands of photos to make emergency maps," said Singh, adding that the inspiration came when Globalmedic found they couldn't navigate their convoys around the closed roads in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.
The charity is also looking at using drones to deliver aid to isolated populations, though they have yet to test that application.
As a Google finalist, Globalmedic is now one of 10 organizations in Canada seeking votes from ordinary people to win a $750,000 grant to expand the drone program.
