October 28, 2005
Trevors who Give Back
Our Trevor is named after Trevor Baylis, a British inventor who has created items like a wind-up radio to be used in areas where electricity and batteries are not feasible.
In 1993, Trevor watched a program about the spread of AIDS in Africa, which observed that in many regions radio was the only available means of communication, but the need for batteries or electricity made them too expensive or too difficult to access....In his workshop at home he experimented with a hand brace, an electric motor and a small radio....His first working prototype ran for 14 minutes on a two minute wind.In 1997, the new generation Freeplay Radio 2 rolled off the production line in South Africa. Smaller and lighter than the original model, the new radio had been designed specially for the Western consumer market and would run for up to an hour with a thirty second wind.
Now, here comes another Trevor, Trevor Field, who has invented the "play pump -- a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin."
He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.
It's brilliant—kids get a play structure and the community gets clean water close to home. Go Trevors!