The young woman highlights the importance of young people being concerned about the water problem.
Thanks to a scholarship awarded by the “Juventudes” program, Elizabeth Salas carried out a research stay at NASA.
León, Gto; February 12, 2025. In Elizabeth’s mind, there is only one clear objective, to develop a project that helps capture, reuse, and generate water, and that this ends the water problem that Mexico has been facing for some years now.
The young woman from the municipality of Romita was one of the five young beneficiaries of a scholarship awarded by the Government of the State of Guanajuato, through Juventudes, to live an international experience at NASA.
“What I have pending this year is an educational workshop focused on raising awareness about how you care for and manage the water you have available in your home and your community, but also a medium-term project that I also want to develop with my mentor, in collaboration, is a prototype of a bag that will allow you to purify water quickly, having the capacity of 1 or 2 liters and this type of bag is inspired by those used where natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods occur and are part of emergency kits,” said Elizabeth.
For 4 months, the young woman from Romita was able to carry out a research stay at NASA, with which she was able to analyze options to improve her project and begin its implementation in rural areas of the state, describing it as a quick and effective solution to have water available.
“It is viable because the bags are very simple, you only use plastic, a membrane, which is a little more expensive and difficult to have available, but the principle and the prototype are very simple, so I think that in a year it could be applied.”
For Liz, the water problem is an issue that should concern and occupy the youth of Guanajuato, because the availability of this vital liquid is essential to continue with all the daily activities of the human being, for this reason, she made a call to the youth community of Guanajuato.
“Water is a limited resource, year after year we have less available, although we know that only less than 20% of the water in the world is freshwater, I think that in the following years, we have already seen it in the past years with the periods of drought here in Mexico, there are cities right now where there is a shortage of water, we have seen it with Monterrey and we have seen it with León, so it is a problem that will not only affect young people, but all people and I think that emphasis should be placed on how to develop technologies to treat water because it will allow us to survive on earth.”
She pointed out that we are still in time for each of the inhabitants of the state to take action to take care of the water, “although we have already had problems with drought, we see how fortunately the dams and bodies of water have been
recovering, we have also had periods of rain, but we do not have to depend on the arrival of a period of rain and everything will be replenished, right now it has worked, but for that very reason I believe that we are still in time to be able to continue betting on these technologies, invest in them and that in the future it will be more solid and we will not struggle so much.”
Finally, Elizabeth urged the youth of Guanajuato to open their minds and think of solutions to global or community problems rather than only addressing individual problems.
“My message is that it is always good to focus not only on your interests in science, not on selfish interests, but to be able to identify what problems there are in your community, because sooner or later they will end up affecting you and your family, so when you stop thinking about yourself or your family and focus more on the people you live with and how everyone can have a better quality of life, that is when you begin to have this vision of the common good and I think it is very important to think globally, not just locally.”
Source: Gobierno de Guanajuato
