Mereko

["Mereko" = "I am leaving" in Twi]

Today was the IDDS 2009 Closing Ceremony. It is very sad to think about saying goodbye to all of the wonderful friends I have met here. I was worried I might never see many of them again, but other veteran IDDSr’s quickly comforted me by describing how surprised they always are by how tight the IDDS community stays. There is still much work to be done. What a great excuse to continue working with these wonderful people!

This will most likely be my last post from Ghana. I am in my room with Daniel packing at this very moment. We leave for Accra tomorrow. We will be attending Maker Fair Africa with our prototypes. Our large group is going to take over an entire hostel in the city! I leave for JFK and then Cbus on Saturday. I look forward to catching up with some of you in person. For others, I will continue to post some more thoughts after I return home.

Final Presentation Posters

Below I have included PDFs of our posters which my team will present tomorrow at the final presentations.  The first poster will also be sent to each of the ten villages IDDS teams have visited over the past month.   I personally visited four of these villages.  Many of the people I met during these visits are being transported by IDDS to Kumasi tonight so that they can attend the presentations tomorrow.

The content is not very technical on purpose.  The most beautiful part of our siphon design is not very well explained.  I will need more time to explain, and will do so later, but for now: the hydrogen gas actuates the siphon when it reaches a set volume.  This correlates directly to a known amount of chlorine produced, and is entirely independant of the rate at which production occurs!  Beautiful.  If you have questions, please ask!  I look forward to explaining this better after I return and have speedy internet again.  Cheers!

Local Chlorine Production Final Presentation Posters

Crunch time

I just returned from my third and final village stay. This time my whole team of six traveled together (with three other teams) to the villages of New Longoro, Gomboi, and Dwere. Our team took five different working prototypes for people to interact with and redesign with us. We had a very positive response and are now working to finalize our design(s) and prototype(s). We must also create a poster and short presentation for the big finale early next week!

As Timothy, my Ghanain friend, says, I am tired like a pregnant fish! Goodnight.

IDDS Family Fun

We had our first design review last Friday at the Intermediate Technology Transfer Unit (ITTU) of KNUST at Suame Magazine (a giant industrial scrap yard/craftsmen workspace/small business paradise).  This involved much preparation and a presentation by each team on their current problem framing and design(s).  The idea was to get feedback on our progress and solicit knowledge from other IDDS participants as well as the faculty and staff of the ITTU.  Our review went reasonably average.  My expectations for the quality of presentations (both those I give and those given to me) are inevitably too high.  So it goes.

This past weekend was our first and only free weekend at IDDS.  I spent almost all of it having fun with the people here.  We went dancing, took a day trip to Cape Coast, and I attended several “How-Tos”.  These taught me how to make a very effective solar water heater out of almost entirely recycled materials as well as how to make several types of inexpensive biodigesters.  Go cool technology!!

Atop the Cape Coast Castle (main exit point of slaves headed to the Americas)

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Andres and Jess just before getting soaked by several huge waves

Monday night was international potluck night.  We were told to group ourselves into countries/regions and cook large batches of traditional food.  I have never had such an incredible array of delicious food at one time.   Some other Americans helped me make buckeyes!  Despite being pure sugar, chocolate and peanut butter, most people enjoyed them.

The past few days have been a blur of design, prototyping, business planning, electrolysis science, and people.  Stay tuned.

Before I go, I must give a special hello to my man, the money, Robinson.  He managed to get a personal “hello” out to me via Ruben, a Guatemalan IDDS participant here with me in Ghana.  Glad to hear you’re doing well!

We’ve produced…something!

Jess, Barnard and Ste in the main Kumasi market buying dynamos and searching for electronics. Note the Guiness billboard - Guiness is brewed in Kumasi!

Late last night my team (with some great help from IDDS superstars Barnard and Nagle) connected two stips of aluminum can (electrodes 1.0) to a dynamo (an AC generator) which we installed on an old bicycle. We then put the aluminum ends into a highly saturated salt-water solution. The pedals were cranked and vola! Bubbles!!! In the characteristic electrochlorination reaction H2 gas is formed so bubbles should occur. A DC battery produced an even more pronounced effect. While we could never smell chlorine, and mad green and black gunk (aluminum oxide compounds I presume) formed on the electrodes, our first attempt did produce something!

Baby steps, right?

Village Visit Number Mmienu

Wo ho te sehn?? [How are you?? in Twi and Mmienu means two]

I just returned from the village (more like small rural town) of Offuman.  My Ghanain teammate, Amiinu, and I were very surprised to find that Affuman has a central chlorination and water distribution system (installed by the government many years ago).  We had a great time with the water technician, Paul, who manages the chlorination process and manually adds the chlorine every three days.  He currently buys chlorine (sodium hypochlorite) tablets in bulk from the nearest commercial town.  We did some quick calculations and preliminarily concluded that, given the price of salt in Offuman, a small scale electro-chlorination machine could save the town’s water board money and could allow for small volumes of concentrate to be sold to those wanting to chlorinate river water on their own.  We still need to do a full calculation which includes the payback price of the machine itself, though, I am very positive about this new direction.

Woman of Offuman collecting cholorinated water

Paul spent a few hours with us going through different design options. After he told us he would prefer to produce the small amount of electricity required using pedal-power (over a hand crank, solar, batteries, etc.), we found an old bicycle to use to visualize different design options. Location of insulated volume, type of cap, type of measuring system, etc., etc.) It was co-creation at its best!!! Now, assuming we can pull through with a working prototype, Paul will be invested into the project as he was a part of the design from the start, and the solution itself should be appropriate for his community as it was designed from his perspective (I love this!). Provided we go with this scale (four of our other team members went to smaller and more primitive villages), we will build a prototype and bring it to Paul in two weeks for him to test and offer more refinement suggestions. Then, we have a few more days for tweaks before we have our final presentations (Ste recently let me know representatives from the Gates Foundation (not Bill) will be in attendance!). Of course, representatives from all of the villages have also been invited. Then, after IDDS officially closes, we’re off to the Inter-African Maker’s Fair to display all twelve new prototypes!

Outside of design work, two friends (Joseph and Carla) and I stole a few hours one night to have a drink at Affuman’s local bar. There is one local beer that I really like (it is a Ghanain stout!). Much of our conversations kept coming back to Obama. It is amazing to see how much hope he has brought to people of all countries. Joseph is from Tanzania, loves Obama, and feels he needs to take care of the U.S. first because they elected him and there will be plenty of time for Africa later. Carla was actually in DC for election day and had never felt such an atmosphere. From the way she described it, I really wish I had been in DC at that time (sigh: thesis, class, capstone project…). Ever since I visited Europe two years ago and started learning about all of the destructive global policies of the U.S. during the past few years, I have been a little discouraged about America. It didn’t help growing up in Ohio, a state which is almost always portrayed as the most uninteresting, rural and run-down state in America. Though, over the past year which has culminating in my talk with Joseph and Carla, I have become more and more proud of the U.S., Ohio, and Columbus for that matter. Americans are a uniquely diverse collection of hard-working good people, and I am proud to be one of them. It was great to honestly feel this way.

Ste and Ghana welcome the Obama family!

Design Woes

As many of you know, working on a design project is always more complex than the technical design involved. There so many human factors which influence the use and perception of a device. This is especially true when working on a water quality design project. So many people have grown up drinking what the WHO considers highly contaminated water. Daniel, my roommate, told me a story about this. When babies are born in his village, they are immediately washed with river water. This rinse water is collected and poured through some thatched roofing-type material and collected again. It is then given to the baby to drink as their first taste of water. Their bodies grow used to the microorganisms and other contaminants from day 1. Many Ghanaians are very proud of this tolerance. So, why would they want to spend a little extra time and resources to disinfect their water with chlorine? I’m not being sarcastic.  If I had been raised in one of these villages, I would think the same way.

A very provoking and interesting lecture on Ghanain culture by a local professor

In general, all of the teams are having trouble moving from the idea generation to conception selection and model building phases of design. There are so many issues swarming around our thoughts, and it seems that they all cannot be accounted for in any single, elegant design. Amy gave us an awesome pep talk yesterday morning which made us all feel like we are in this same boat, together. She is awesome!!

Last night we had a little pool party which was great fun. Later today I leave for my second village visit (Offuman) to try to start the process of co-creation. We would really like to play around with some concept models of possible designs of the chlorine production device with people who would be using it to get their input and innovative thoughts on how to make it perfect for them. This is the spirit of IDDS. Yeh!

The IDDS familyhas  gone way out of their way to make me feel special on my birthday.  While I really don’t enjoy celebrating my birthdays, it always does feel nice after the fact.  Each person here expresses celebration in their own way; it is so interesting and so much fun!  I can’t wait to celebrate their special days with them.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Co-Creation

I have found myself some free time, so let’s have a go at a real blog post for once. I’ll begin with my general take of this whole experience and approach to development and engineering service.

In short, the approach is co-creation: to assemble a diverse group of innovators, especially from developing communities who hope to serve their own communities, to collaboratively create new technological solutions. The aim is to invent novel technologies and cultivate new technologists in the process. So, what the heck am I doing here considering I am not from a typical developing community nor do I need to be pushed to be transformed into a technologist? Brilliant question. I still don’t know the answer, but am starting to get an idea. Please comment on what you think about my niche at this summit.

In seriousness, there is no other effort like this one. Our purpose is not to implement these technologies. The people of developing communities are more than capable of implementing appropriate solutions for themselves. This realization alone would solve innumerable problems currently being faced by engineering service-learning projects and groups like Engineers for a Sustainable World and Engineers Without Borders. [It would also make most of these projects and organizations fairly obsolete – which is why they will never change.] But there already exists so many technological solutions appropriate for people in developing communities, so why aren’t more of these people implementing these existing technologies themselves? My answer is that they either don’t know such technologies exist, or they don’t feel confident enough to invest themselves and their communities in trying such new technologies. IDDS works to solve these issues. [For better or worse, it is encouraging me to implement my previous knowledge and these new technologies in developing communities in the States, viz. Native American communities.]

Another important aspect of IDDS is to develop prototypes and not papers. We are here to invent new technologies appropriate for rural areas in extreme poverty. Doing so requires actually building and testing these devices with the people they are for. This is what we are doing. [And sometimes papers come out of it all anyway: Ste was awarded a U.S. patent, a $100K Gates Foundation Grant, and a $100K Cambridge University Grant for his project from last year’s IDDS!]

This ties nicely into my time spent living in the villages. So far, I have visited New Longoro, Dwere, and Gomboi. All of these villages are about a six hour drive north of Kumasi in a very rural area. New Longoro is at the center situated next to the main road (which goes from Accra north all the way into Mauritania!). It has very limited access to grid electricity as well as a community water well. Dwere and Gomboi are much more isolated. They have no electricity and no water except for the stream that flows nearby. I spent most of my time in Gomboi (and stayed in the Chief’s hut).

The beautiful village of Gomboi

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Some friends from Gomboi

We spent a lot of time talking with the people of this community. There were only ten to fifteen families who live there. Ste, my teammate (Ph.D. student in ChemE from Cambridge in UK), and I went to the river with the women and girls to fetch drinking water. I carried a small bucket back on my head. I was soaking wet by the time we made it, and all the kids were having a great time with me. The kids really loved my arm hair and the hair on my head. I found out later that I was probably the first white person many of them had ever seen. In a few days I will be heading out to another village (this one is more like a small town) to get another perspective on our design challenge (localized chlorine production from table salt).

There is so much more, but I should try to keep these posts reasonably short. Sleep well.

Local Chlorine Production

E cho!

I now have wireless and mobile access to this blog which means more frequent short updates.

Last week, before our village visit, we all voted on project interests and were grouped into project teams. I am on the local chlorine production team (more details to come in the Design Project page). Basically, our task is to take well-known science which converts table salt and water into a concentrated chlorine solution and create a small-scale, very inexpensive product appropriate for treating water in a typical Ghanain village. There are some commercial available products, but they are definitely not appropriate for this context. Our team of six had a long discussion with Paul Polak last night which was not very encouraging but very informative. We spent most of yesterday brainstorming ideas about the true problems involved here, and today we move into idea generation of solutions! We have quite a long way to go.

Jam jam,
Eric

Life at IDDS: days = weeks

I arrived in Accra a week from Tuesday. I have spent four days on the KNUST campus in Kumasi and three days in a remote village named Gumboi. At KNUST I am staying in a Morril Tower-esque dorm sharing a suite with 5 other men and a room with one other. My roommate’s english name is Daniel. He is in his forties (my guess) and from a small village in northern Ghana (near Gomboi). He has a wife and one son. We talk alot and always shake hands which usually turns into him never letting go and us holding hands for long periods at a time. He is so very nice. I’m glad to have such a wonderful roommate (like I could have really had a bad one).

Timothy and Daniel beginning to make charcoal from agricultural wastes! Amy happily observes in the background.

The others in my suite are from different parts of India, Singapore, and L.A. Overall, there are over twenty organizers here and a little over sixty design team participants. Of the participants, most are skilled craftsmen, professional engineers or designers, international aid organization workers, and activists. The others are students (mostly graduate or just graduated like me). MIT, Berkeley, and CalTech are representing. I am known as the Ohioan.

Some fellow IDDS participants and organizers

We are already on a whirlwind pace. Amy Smith has not slept more than 2.5 hours any night except for the past two in the villages, and most of the other organizers are the same. We are being very well taken care of by the IDDS staff.

Off to my Twi lesson.