On Sunday, 5th of June, we moved into the Cure Hospital guest house, along with two Malawian interns, Clog and Owen. Clog and Owen joined us on the water project. The week of the 6th to the 10th of June we traveled around Blantyre looking for communities to install our water purification system. We began with a site in the township of Njulli, named Katsidzi, the people from this community used groundwater from a dug out well as their drinking water. We then traveled to the township of Lunzu, to Kamwendo Village, where people used an open reservoir as their source of drinking water. We sampled both sites, and tested them for turbidity, pH, conductivity and hardness. In order to test for hardness, we used a titration method, which to my luck I had only ever learned of in a classroom setting and not a laboratory setting, since I took a research course, which replaced my general chemistry laboratories. Being the chemist here I had to pretend to know what exactly was going on. Titrations are easy to do, I just happened to freak out because I had never actually done them, I taught myself, and then taught the team, which consists of engineers, how to of them. Both samples showed high amounts of hardness and high turbidity.

This week was also the week Dr. Loyo from Rice University came to assist us. He helped us get into track. I was a little concerned that what we were doing as a project was not what NEWT wanted us doing so I asked him and his response was “Well, you are in an internship, and your advisor is Dr. Mkandawire so you have to do what she tells you to do, which is what you are working on right now.” He was right so I continued working on this project.

The reason why I was not sure about this project was that before the internship began we were told that we were going to engineer our own design using moringa seed to treat water. The first week that we were here we had a meeting with Dr. Makandawire, who is the dean of engineering and our advisor for the internship, Aaron, who was in a year long fellowship, and two professors and two students from the Polytechnic. In this meeting Aaron presented a blue barrel system that he had worked on before in Southeast Asia, and he wanted to construct one in a community in Malawi. We were all assigned to look for a community to build the system in, to build the system, and see how well it worked. I was fine with this, except that it did not meet what we were told we were going to do before the internship began.

 

For the next two weeks we continued working with Aaron on this blue barrel system.