Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital

Monday in the morning we got t the Poly, looking for Dr. Leautaud. We found her in the design studio, we went outside to talk to her, we explained to he what we had been doing and she decided that this project was not appropriate for us, just like I thought. She explained how we are our own program and should not be involved with outside sources.

We were back to testing how well the moringa seed purifies the water. After we talked to her we scheduled a trip to the Lunzu school site to collect samples and to start testing the seed. We were told we needed to travel with one of our advisors, which were never around. We emailed one of them and he said that he could come with us, just so he would cancel on us five minutes before leaving to the site. For a second time we got shut down. We tried to come up with a project that did not require us going after our advisors so they could travel with us. We remembered that Dr. Leautaud had told us something about testing the water at Queens Elizabeth Central Hospital, which is right next to the Poly. We set up a meeting with the Medical director at the Hospital, we wrote a letter that asked the medical director to please let us test their water, for academic reasons, which Dr. Mkandawire signed. We took this letter to the medical director and she agreed to let us test the water at the hospital. This project seemed great since the hospital is right next to the Polytechnic, and Queens Elizabeth was having some trouble with its water source. We were ready to start sampling their water, we even went to another hospital and scheduled a meeting with their medical director to ask for permission to test their water to compare the quality of the water in both hospitals. First we wanted to get a heads up from Dr. Leautaud. We met with her and got turned down for a third time.

Third week

We continued looking for sites to build the system in. We first traveled to a primary school in Lunzu. Five minutes walking from the school was an open water reservoir, which was their source of drinking water. We later traveled to Chikwawa. In order to get to Chikwawa Dr. Mkandawire drove us to a minibus station, we were on a minibus for about an hour, from where the minibus dropped us off a driver picked us up, and he drove us thirty minutes up the mountain, this drive up the mountain required a four-wheel drive. Once we got to Chikwawa we talked with the people that lived there, and they showed us their water source, which was a borehole. We were only able to get water samples at the school site at Lunzu, since I was not able to sterilize the bottles the morning we left for Chikwawa because someone was cooking sweet potatoes in the autoclave. The Lunzu sample showed 49 E.coli coliform forming units. We sat and tried to come to a consensus as to where we wanted to build the system. Many variables affected this decision, I thought, the school site in Lunzu was most suitable, not only because it was highly contaminated with E.coli, but because getting transportation there would not be a problem, unlike to Chikwawa, which required a four wheel drive. . The next day in the morning Aaron somehow, without having anyone agree on this, decided that we were going to build the system in Chikwawa. The rest of the week we were out on Blantyre shopping for materials to build the system. Aaron found a lodge that we would stay at for a whole week so we would not have to travel back and fourth every day from the Poly to Chikwawa. We were scheduled to leave the coming Monday and stay in Chikwawa the whole week building the system.

Brock emailed Dr. Loyo and Dr. Leataud telling them that we were leaving for the next week, and asking them if there was any procedure we should take before leaving. Dr. Leautaud responded to the email right away telling us to not leave on Monday, that she wanted to meet with us that Monday.

Blue Barrel System

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 had20160610_130152 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.

10 Days (Part Two)

I will now proceed to talk about the actual ten days I have spent in Blantyre, since the last blog only included my travel here and my first day here. But first I will talk about why I am here.

This summer I have traveled to Blantyre, Malawi, where I will be working on a water treatment project, we will be building a system in one of the communities around Blantyre, which will provide people with clean drinking water, we will take samples before and after they go through the system to see how reliable this system is to treat water. We will also try to implement Moringa Oleifera, a seed which is abundant in most parts of Africa, into this system.

Back to what I have actually done the ten days I have been here, I will begin saying that I have met so many people, and every single one of them has been so nice and reachable. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I did not really start anything since Brock, the other NEWT intern that traveled to Blantyre, was not here, these days I just went around the Polytechnic meeting professors and technicians, and looking for equipment and laboratories in which I could conduct research in. I talked to the chemistry and biology departments in the school, which will allow me to use their equipment to analyze water samples. An instrument which we will be allowed to use is the Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, which determines the concentration of a particular element in a sample. I am very excited to use it since I have never used one before.20160603_141919 When Brock got here is when the project actually started rolling, we have most of our experimental protocols down and ready to go, this Wednesday we will be traveling to several communities around Blantyre to see in which one is most adequate to build the system in.

Also look at how pretty Malawi is.20160605_105803

10 Days (Part one)

Its been ten days since I arrived in Blantyre. Everything has happened so fast, the only thing I can say I clearly remember from those ten days is stuffing myself with passion fruit, which is delicious by the way.20160530_161732Now that I have finally settled and unpacked all my stuff I can finally sit down and think of what has actually happened this past ten days. Let’s go back 12 days ago, May, 26th when I flew out of El Paso, my parents drove me to the airport, where my closest friends were waiting for me to say goodbye. My mom and dad got emotional since this is the longest amount of time I will be away from home, I’m not going to lie, I did too. I flew to Houston where I met up with the Rice 360 interns, from there we flew to Heathrow, London where we had a six-hour layover, although it did not feel that long. After the six-hour layover, we had to sit in the plane and wait for another two hours because the pilot needed a letter signed in order to take off, I, of course, was not bothered by this and went to sleep.

I was born in Mexico, therefore I travel under a Mexican passport, which was something completely weird to the officer in immigration at Johannesburg. When I handed him my passport he stared at it with such a clueless face. He did not even open the passport book, he just sent me directly to customs upstairs. I was frightened by this, since all of my colleagues, who were traveling under an American passport, got past immigration with no problem. I went upstairs and got lost, when I finally found where i needed to be, I got told I could not go pick up my luggage, so the other interns had to do me the favor. At the airport in Blantyre, we got picked up by a nice man with a sign that said “Rice interns” (I don’t go to Rice though??). I still cannot believe I am here, in Malawi, for a summer internship, after my first year of college.

*There’s a part two to this that talks about what I am doing here, please cope with me, I have a lot of things to say. *