Midweek we planned a visit to two different rural sites to investigate their water sources, and if they employed any types of treatments, what sort of water problems they experienced, and if they would be interested in a water treatment apparatus. We first went to the Njuli village site, investigating three water sites. The first was a hole dug into the soil near farming land. This water was extremely turbid, but the villagers said that if they planned to drink the water, they would boil or treat the water with chlorine first. The main concern with this site would be run off from the farming, especially if they used fertilizers. The leader of the village gave us permission to take the water sample and then escorted us to two other places in the village, all using deep wells that were covered. This water seemed significantly less turbid than the first sample. However, at all three sources, residents expressed that the main issue with their water sources was not necessarily cleanliness, but access. The water table would recede greatly, meaning that they could not get water whenever they wanted.

We then went to a second village, Lunzu, where an open reservoir was used for some water sources. We gathered the sample directly from the open source, meaning that it was more likely that this sample would contain biological contaminants than at the first village. However, we have yet to obtain equipment for adequate biological sampling, so we cannot test for parameters other than simple ones such as hardness and conductivity for these preliminary collections. When we were returning, we lost one sample jar to a bumpy road, meaning that we only had two samples from the first village. At both villages, the leaders and other members of the community were very welcoming, which made the visits both productive and exciting, even if we lost one of the samples.

Tests for hardness, conductivity, pH, and turbidity will be done in the lab, but because only one site had the potential for biological contaminants and many of the villages treated their drinking water to some degree, it seems unlikely that these sites will be used for our proposed apparatus. Therefore, these samples are more for establishing lab procedure and outlining parameters.

Outside of the project, it has been interesting to see the contrast in development between cell service and more traditional things like postal services. It is quite easy to have clear reception in the villages we visited, removed from urban environments. However, it is hard to find post offices in Blantyre, even though it is a city. Malawi seems to have skipped over certain technologies as it has developed, leaving empty space in areas such as a developed and reliable postal system or landline services in favor of the newer cellular technologies. This may be partly because the US and Europe, when investing money in Malawi and the rest of Africa, focused more on telecom companies, rather than postal services.