Simple solar solution supports family health

Tiuneta with her daughters.

Tiuneta (30) who is a mother of three beautiful girls and soon to be a mother of a fourth is one of the mothers-to-be to receive solar water distillation units along with training. A Solvatten unit is a unit that can boil water using the heat from the sun.

Tiuneta and her family live in Betio, the most crowded town on south Tarawa, where there are around 11,000 inhabitants per square kilometre.

Living in Betio has been a great challenge to Tiuneta, especially in getting fresh drinking water for her children, as well as earning money. As a mother, Tiuneta has a huge responsibility for her family which is giving support to her husband and her children by providing them with nutritious food, clean drinking water, washing their clothes and more. 

“Since I do not have a job, I spend most of my time doing the housework in my major role as a housewife,” she says.

Since Tiuneta and her family depend on PUB water for drinking, it is not safe for them to drink unboiled water as it has caused diarrhea to her children. So Tiuneta, boils her children’s drinking water every day. This is also an issue as it is expensive to use a kerosene stove every day for boiling drinking water. 

“Sometimes when we did not have money to buy our kerosene for boiling our children’s drinking water, we went to the nearest church and fetched our children’s drinking water from the rainwater tank, and just let them drink it without boiling it,” explains Tiuneta

This has become a concern to Tiuneta since her children are young and it’s not safe for them to drink unpurified drinking water.

She is thankful to be invited to participate in ChildFund’s training on how to use Solvatten units, and to receive a Solvatten unit too.

“I have been using this unit to boil my children’s drinking water, making tea, even cooking our noodles with it, and boiling our children’s bathwater.  I find that this unit has helped us to save our money as instead of purchasing kerosene or butane gas to boil our drinking water, I can just use this unit when it’s sunny to boil our water, and it also saves our time as I can just leave this unit under the sun to do its work and I can do other things,” she says.