Jonathan Dill: Far from Typical

Photo: courtesy of Jonathan Dill

The problems of the developing world would usually be one of the last things on the mind of a typical American teenager, let alone something like the spread of waterborne diseases.

But Jonathan Dill is far from typical.

This year, the 19-year-old student was recently awarded a Global Action Award from Mercy Corps for a water filtration method that takes advantage of two of readily available resources – cotton and charcoal – to help protect thousands of Africans from such preventable illnesses as cholera and typhoid fever.

Growing up, Jonathan’s parents worked for the State Department, and would bring their young son along with them on trips to places like New Guinea and Ethiopia. It was on these trips that Jonathan began to gain a greater sense of what was at stake for the world’s poor, and he was able to hit on a solution with the potential to save thousands of lives.

“I read a newspaper article about people in India using saris to filter their drinking water. We had just gotten back from a trip to Ethiopia where they grow their own cotton and weave it on homemade spindles, and I wondered if we couldn’t transfer that idea to the local cotton fabrics,” he explained.

Jonathan, at the time a freshman in high school, researched this idea as a science project, and took time to seek out grants to help fund a trip to Africa for testing.

“We went over to Mali and Burkina Faso and then up the Niger river into Timbuktu,” he recalled, “testing water in tributaries. We bought local cotton everywhere we went and took local water samples.” Although the results were promising, it wasn’t until charcoal was introduced to the filters that the impact became something substantial. “We were able to get a testing instrument designed for the Peace Corps that not only looks at how many particles are in the water, but their size as well,” he said. Using those numbers, Jonathan was able to pick out the particles that cause diseases and was able to track their decline after the water was filtered.

Jonathan went on a three-week trip earlier this year – in partnership with YouthNoise, a nonprofit based in San Francisco – to northern Ghana to help teach this new water filtration method to as many people as possible. “We helped create filters of all different size. One using old water bottles for the boys going out in the field who have to drink from ponds, another using buckets for family use.” Jonathan also helped introduce the filters to a number of schools in the area.

These days, Jonathan is juggling the demands of college life (he is studying International Relations at Bowdoin College in Maine) along with his work to build support for his water project, which hasn’t been hard to come by. “There’s a church group that wants to become involved. I even had a middle school girl who sold Pop Tarts at her school to help support this,” he said.

Jonathan is also looking to the future and hoping to improve the project better, as well as taking it into other regions of the world. “I spent some time in Togo last year getting in touch with organizations over there. But the first thing is going back and surveying what we’ve already done. This is still sort of in its infancy, so we are trying to build it up from here.”