T
No. 8 Vol. 4
www.mypaperonline.com
Chatham Declares April As Volunteer Appreciation Month
he Chatham Township Committee recently recognized the hard work of its many volunteers when Mayor Curt Ritter declared April, ‘Volunteer Appreciation Month.’ In a proclamation that was read into the record, Ritter states “Chatham Township is blessed to have hundreds of volunteers, who deserve to be recognized for their hard work and dedication on behalf of our grateful community. These individuals volunteer thousands of hours each year, whether it’s serving as first responders, coaching youth sports, raising funds and
C
April 2016
awareness for our athletic programs, education and schools, or supporting our seniors, the environment, or serving our local government on a committee or board.” Ritter states “Chatham Township recognizes that volunteering improves our quality of life, increases community participation and is one of the many reasons Chatham Township is a great place to live and raise a family. We are eternally grateful to the women, men and youth who utilize their time and talent to make a difference in the lives of others in our community.”
Photo by Tom Salvas
CHS Junior Makes Strides In Improving Sanitation
hatham High School junior Nishita Sinha won five awards at the New Jersey Regional Science Fair at Rutgers University on March 11-12 for her project on Safe Sanitation Solutions. In her project, Nishita is developing an effective and economic filtration system to protect groundwater from enteric pathogens leaching from human waste. Her goal is to make safe sanitation accessible to more people in developing countries. Sinha won the following awards: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pulse of the Planet Award, New Jersey Water Environment Association Award, International Sustainable World Award, ASU Walton Sustainability Award, and the Theobald Smith Society Award in Microbiology. She plans to present her project at the NJ Youth Science and Humanities Symposium at Rutgers University at the
end of this month, participate in the International Sustainable World Project Olympiad in Houston, TX, in April, and attend the NJ Water Environment Annual Conference in Atlantic City in May. Sinha formulated the idea for this project during her trip to her family’s ancestral village in India where her grandmother still lives, where she discovered that the majority of families lacked basic sanitation services, such as running water and toilet facilities. She also learned that gastrointestinal diseases were quite common, especially among children. She started researching this situation and found out that the lack of sanitation facilities was the main reason for girls to drop out of school when they reached puberty. Sinha surveyed 30 local families about their sanitation routines, sources of drinking water, and occurrences of stomach/gas-
trointestinal illnesses. She used this information to try to come up with the ways to help the local people and sought and secured funding to install 61 composting toilets in the village. She then evaluated a number of different designs of composting toilets and hypothesized that in the tight living conditions in rural India, the liquid waste discharged from the toilets into the groundwater may contaminate the sources of drinking water with bacteria present in human waste. In the current phase of her project, Sinha is working on continued on page 6