This is a story of how one man's ingenuity benefits entire community. In a small community in South-east Asia where the houses were so close together that even on the brightest of days the sunlight barely reached the ground. This resulted in people spending most of their life in darkness. A lot of the older people spent most of their time in bed as there was not a lot of things that they could do in the dark anyway. Those who did manage to get up would only stumble around inside of their houses as they were so poorly lit that they would be constantly tripping over objects due to the poor lighting conditions.

One enterprising young man, Illac Diaz,of My Shelter Foundation, decided that he was going to do something about this situation. One day while he was out scavenging he saw a bunch of plastic 2 liter pop bottles. This gave him an idea and he took them home with him. Although he was not the originator of this low tech idea most people claim that it was invented by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He thought that he could make use of them to direct some of the bright sunshine into his house. Some of his friends laughed at him and no doubt thought that he was crazy. How could you pull sunlight into your house with empty pop bottles.However he did not let these taunts deter him from his plan.

Finding some corrugated steel that matched the sheeting on his roof, he proceeded to cut an opening that would allow him to insert his bottle fastening it to the steel roofing material with an epoxy glue. He then filled his bottle with distilled water, topping it off with three tablespoons of bleach. He then sealed his bottle and proceeded to his roof. Once he was on his roof he cut a small hole in the roof which allowed him to insert the bottle with the neck part facing upwards.

Once he had his bottle in place he began to secure the metal patch to his main roof to cover the hole in which he had inserted his water-filled pop bottle. Much to his family's surprise there was an instant flooding of sunlight pouring into the once dark and gloomy interior of his home. This one small idea had managed to transform the lives, not only of his family but to the entire community.

Just imagine what it must have felt like to those people who had hitherto been damned to live forever in gloom and darkness, even on the brightest of days. One man was able to bring happiness and joy to an entire community by finding a solution to a very real and pressing problem. The information used in this article was found on the internet in the public domain.