such stuff as dreams are made on

Health Coach Training in Uganda

2010-08-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded a couple of pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kendradey/Uganda#

Check out this video I made about VHT Trainings in Uganda:

Since I arrived in Uganda a month ago I have been wondering how such a dry place could have such richly green vegetation. By the end of my half-hour walk into the office each morning my clothes, skin, face, and mouth would be coated with dust kicked up by the trucks. We remarked how the weather was perfect -- hot but not too hot during the day and cool but not too cool at night, and an occasional sprinkle one or twice a week at the most, not enough to even wet your clothes. I could not understand how a place that seemed so dry could sustain a sort of jungle vegetation not so different from the rain-forests of Ecuador.

The paradox was resolved three days ago when we were walking home from the office for lunch and the skies opened up in a downpour, turning the dusty dirt road to wet clay and mud. This event has repeated itself at least once a day since then, and brings the days activities to a halt each time. It is on such a rainy morning that I take advantage of some remaining battery power in my laptop to write this.

The program that I am working with here is a remarkable one -- a local NGO called Volset is partnering with a US NGO called OmniMed and the local government to train "village health teams" with one community health worker for every 20-30 families. After a week's worth of training, these "VHTs" go back to their villages and start visiting the homes of their neighbors to collect information about the health status of their communities (how many families have latrines, handwashing places, plate drying racks, how many children are immunized, how many cases of malaria there are, etc). They collect this information to give to the local health centers but also work to educate their neighbors and encourage them to fill in the gaps in order to prevent disease and promote health. It is interesting to be a part of a program in this stage of "scaling up" and interesting to see the tradeoffs of training more and more VHTs versus ensuring good support for the ones who already have been trained.

Most of our time here involves working directly with the VHTs -- training them and following-up with those who have already been trained. And these VHTs are amazing, inspiring people, who do all this work with absolutely no reward except the knowledge that they are making a difference in their communities. They are all proud to tell us about how they are seeing their neighbors boiling water, building latrines, taking children for vaccinations. But it is not easy work. How do you insist that an old woman with several young grand children to take care of dig a latrine? How do you tell your neighbors to go to a Health Center when they are sick when more times than not a person will go to a health center, wait through a long line to see a doctor, be told that they have malaria, or TB, but the health center will have run out of medications so they will have to go to a private pharmacy to buy them. The result of this, of course, is that people begin to go directly to the private pharmacy, where they buy medication based on a self-diagnosis or the diagnosis of a nurse who runs the private "clinic" and save all the time and transport cost that a visit to a health center entails.

Which brings me to the bigger picture -- how can a country like Uganda, with all of this foreign aid, a stable government with strong US support not have medicine in their government health centers? People talk about how most of the money stays in the government for internal workings / kick-backs, which I am sure is a big part of the problem, but there is also a greater context. Most obviously and importantly is the legacy of colonialism which shapes so much of the way people think and the way things work. Then there is the fact that the Ugandan government spends so much money on security (sound familiar?) -- both for defense forces within Uganda and the troops they have sent to other countries like the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Somalia. I actually wound up talking about all of this late at night by candlelight with one of the VHTs in his house. Under a roof made of papyrus and sheet plastic, this man listens to the BBC on a radio powered radio and gets a Kenyan newspaper once a week to stay up on what is going on in the world. He explained that the reason that Uganda has been intervening militarily in other countries is that the United States is using Uganda.

Crazy as it seems, I actually have less than 3 weeks left in Uganda. It is always a sad moment to realize that my time is drawing to a close and that I will be leaving behind all the friends I have made here. I do want to stay in touch and involved to the extent that I can, and one thing I've decided to do is find sponsors for one of the amazing young women I have met here, an 18 year old named Saida, to go to nursing school. I'll be going to Kampala with Saida tomorrow to visit nursing schools and find out all the details, but I think it is going to come out to about $100 a month for tuition, room and board for the three years of nursing school here. A substantial amount of money, sure, but it will transform her life and give her the skills to make a real difference in her community. Let me know if you or someone you know might be interested in contributing.

Water system successes

2010-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

For more information about the project, see www.sachayaku.org
For more photos from this trip, check out my picasa album

I went back to Santa Ana Ecuador for four days this December. There is something incredibly special about this community, and it was so wonderful to see everyone again. I have been involved in this place for almost four years now, and children I met as one-year olds just beginning to talk are now about to start first grade.

This girl, Shirla, is one example. The photo on the right is me with my beloved comadre Elsa.

The community water system is still working. It is not textbook perfect, but they know about the problems and how to solve them, and that means my role is to step back and let Santa Ana handle these challenges for themselves.

One of my days was spent on a follow-up to trip to La Encañada, one year after the Santa Ana water board helped them install family-level rainwater systems in each of 9 family homes.

We found all 9 tanks still working, in good condition, and getting very positive reviews from the community. We tested all of the families' water: some had extremely clean water and some quite contaminated. They all emptied and cleaned their tanks in anticipation of our arrival (little bit of mis-communication there), so we had to test water that they had stored in other containers, so it is hard to know whether the rain water tanks themselves were the source of contamination or the storage containers.

Either way, we know that it is possible to have very clean water with this system, but it likely depends on the maintenance each family provides and if and how they store it in another container.

We also repeated a house to house health survey and found that the reported number of times a child had diarrhea in a year dropped from an average of 6.9 to 1.9 times per year from before our intervention, which is quite promising.

The most exciting part of all is that the new mayor has made water her top priority for the next 5 years. Two communities have asked for Santa Ana's help to apply to her for funding for the tanks, and they have both gotten tanks and are working with Santa Ana's water technical team to do the installations. How amazing is that?

The fact that this work is starting to take a life of its own is the ultimate success. However, on this trip I was also touched by a number of anecdotal stories that help me feel in a smaller more personal way that somehow, with all of this effort, we really are making an impact.

Melida, who is one of the people most active in the Santa Ana water system and outreach to other communities told me that she first got interested her first summer when her son came home from school and told her that their water was contaminated and they needed to boil it. I think that the water quality testing kit, which I just restocked thanks to a generous donation, is one of the most important parts of the work that Santa Ana is doing, because it enables people to have these kinds of "ah-hah" moments when they see for the first time what sources are cleanest and why they need to treat their water.

Another anecdote came from the first operator we trained, Oldemar, told me that in his new job in another part of the country, there was a broken pipe and he fixed it with a patch he made by heating up each end of the PVC pipe and molding them with another pipe. The community was so thankful and called him a water engineer.

Medical School

2010-01-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

Sooner or later I figured I should write a blog post about Medical School at UCSF. Hopefully I will put up some more thoughtful and reflective posts at some point in the future.

Last September marked the beginning of a great transition in my life – from the world of water and engineering to the world of health and medicine. It is exciting and at times overwhelming to be entering such a complex world, but I have really been enjoying med school so far. It is hard to capture in a few paragraphs what it means to be studying medicine, but I’ll try to give you at least a rough idea. UCSF is completely pass-fail for the first two years, and the curriculum is based on blocks divided by organ system or major theme. I just finished the 6-week cardiovascular system block in December, for example, and an now a week into the 3-week pulmonary (lung). We have an exam every three weeks or so. Even though the exams aren’t cumulative, it is like studying for the most intense final of undergrad every three weeks. I enjoy the rhythm, because I can focus on thing other than school for two weeks and then put it into high gear for the last week before each exam. The material is interesting and challenging, but it is not very stressful because there are no grades; we only need 70% to pass, and if we don’t pass a test we just take it again. I think it is a brilliant approach, because we can focus on learning as much as we can, and don’t have to play games of selective studying to optimize our test scores.

Since September, I have learned to take patient histories, practiced the routine physical exam, developed a basic understanding of human anatomy over many dozens of hours working with a cadaver in the anatomy lab, and begun the tremendous task of understanding the workings of the human body, how to tell what has gone wrong, and if and how we can intervene to put things right. I loved the cardiovascular block – all the talk of valves and flows and pressure gradients were comfortingly reminiscent of water system engineering.

In many ways I feel very much like I felt as a freshman at MIT – my interests piqued by so many issues and questions but with little knowledge or experience to grapple with any of them. I am thrilled that so many of my classmates are also interested in healthcare for the underserved, global health, health disparities, single payer health care, etc, and that our school not only allows but encourages us to invest our time in such issues. As I anticipated when I decided to come back to the US from Cuba for medical school, sometimes I get extraordinarily frustrated with the US health care system, or, as speakers on the topic tend to quip: the US disease treatment industry. I wish I had some sort of hope to offer in this regard, but I am only beginning to understand the depth of the issues. I believe we need some kind of single-payer solution, and am starting to work through the practicalities and subtleties. This Sunday I am going with a number of other students to a training and then Monday we will be meeting with California legislators about the state-level single payer healthcare bill. Then in the Spring, I will take a comparative policy elective which discusses the health care systems of a number of different countries, which may help me flesh out my thoughts a bit more.

I am often asked what kind of medicine I want to go into. I realize that I am only at the beginning stages of this process and my ideas will most likely change and evolve as I go, but right now I plan on doing some kind of primary care. I am interested in figuring out innovative ways to foster health and increase access to health care in marginalized communities. For a while, my debt will require me to do this kind of work in the United States, but after I have paid it off I want to move abroad, maybe to Latin America, maybe to some other part of the world. I have grand visions of being the village doctor someplace, training and supporting local health promoters, mentoring future doctors in the region, and maybe traveling occasionally to learn from others and share any insights I manage to glean. I am beginning to realize how much I love to teach and how teaching could serve to multiply my impact, whether that is by training health promoters or teaching medical students. However, I think I would rather teach in another country besides the US– solutions to global health issues must be born in the global south, in the minds and hearts of people who share a language, culture, and history with the people they want to serve.

My new home in San Francisco

2009-09-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

I am completely in love with San Francisco. I knew it was a cool city, but I wasn't prepared for just how amazingly cool.

Check out this map of San Francisco to get you oriented. Downtown San Francisco is where are the crazy tall buildings are (the financial district, Union Square, etc). The Mission is an awesome neighborhood with a really high Latino population, lots of latinamerica feeling stores, markets, and restaurants, plus dollar stores and thrift shops. As you can see, my house is right by UCSF and Golden Gate Park is pretty much my backyard...

Photo from: http://www.bloggingsouls.com/archives/2007_03.html
This is a picture of Strawberry Island, which is in the middle of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. I have been running to stow lake in the mornings, across the bridge to the island, around the island and back. It is absolutely gorgeous!

This zoomed in gives you a better idea of my neighborhood. I had no idea how much I lucked out on my room -- the rent is incredibly cheap because the room is very small, but the location cannot be beat.

Plus I have everything I need in my room -- a closet that fits all my stuff, a bed on a loft, and an amazing nook under the loft with a little table and pillows to sit on. You can see more pictures of my room (including my desk, which I now have in my room, unlike my last 3 years at MIT) in my picasa album.

And now, here is a list of some of the things I love so far about living here, in no particular order.

1. Living 3 miles from the ocean -- an easy bike ride through Golden Gate Park.
2. In case I don't feel like biking, living a block away from the MUNI streetcar stop on the line that goes to the ocean and also to downtown San Francisco.
3. My 'commute' to school that consists of walking a block to Irving street, getting in an elevator and going up 8 floors (yes eight) and I am in the student union. Cross the street and I am in the academic buildings.
4. My room, how small and fun it is, and how it won't let me accumulate stuff even if I want to.
5. My house. It is really spacious and full of character, and the other women who live with me are total kindred spirits -- environmentalist, socially conscious, spanish-speaking, etc.
6. The sheer number of ethnic restaurants within walking distance.
7. The friendly people in San Francisco. Multiple complete strangers have offered me coupons in stores -- combined they saved me $25
8. The random breathtaking views of the ocean, or the bay, or just down an insanely steep street I see while walking/biking through San Francisco
9. The street names carved into the sidewalk tiles at street corners, kind of like in Cuba.
10. The quantity of thrift stores and dollar stores within a few blocks of each other in the mission
11. No winter
12. The fact that San Francisco is, if anything, even more hippie and progressive than Boston. wow
13. Fresh produce from farmers markets YEAR ROUND : )

A month in madison; off to San Francisco

2009-08-31T15:45:00.001-07:00

I've been home in Madison for just over a month now -- the longest time I've spent at home since I left for MIT four years ago. Free from work and school, I had a lot of time to process the past and add some definition to my vision for the future. It has been a month of deepening relationships with family, re-connecting with old friends, letting go of a three year relationship and learning to love again. I spent a week wilderness canoeing in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park with my dad, visited my beloved grandmother in Duluth not once but twice, realized what a truly amazing person my sister is, and became inspired by the company my mother founded, which makes its own brand of hormone free and organic whey protein powder for shakes and drinks: 'teraswhey'.

The whey plant by a pond in Reedsburg WI, and a canister of the final product. Fair trade chocolate, yum...

People often ask me what it is like to come back to the US after a semester in Cuba, or a summer in the rain forest of Ecuador. The answer is that I now go back and forth between developing countries and the US so often that I no longer get culture shock when I go nor reverse culture shock when I return. Instead, I feel like my lives in each setting, once so completely distinct from one another, have been merging. Four years ago, when I went to MIT, I filled the trunk and back seat of my mothers car with my stuff and found it hard to imagine how international students simply arrived on planes with a couple of checked bags.

Off to medical school in San Francisco.

Tomorrow I move to San Francisco, and instead of taking a car full of stuff, I am taking the same amount that I always take to Cuba, or Mexico, or Ecuador -- my hiking backpack plus a school backpack. There is a pillow, blanket, and sheet in there this time since I'm not staying with a host family, but the rest is pretty much the same. Why? Because really, it is the same stuff I need to be comfortable and happy anywhere, with slight variations for climate.

A semester in Cuba

2009-08-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

Where I have I been for the last 6 months? A country where e-mail contact was a real challenge, never mind blog posting, and hence the absence of posts since January. A country where ice cream cones cost 5 cents on the street and medical school is free, not only for its citizens but for thousands of aspiring doctors from developing countries around the world. A country with comparable health statistics (child mortality, life expectancy, etc) to the united states despite economic hardship exacerbated by an economic blockade left over from the cold war era. The country, of course, is Cuba and I was there for a semester at the Latin America School of Medicine (website in spanish).

Inside the glass windows is the library, and below it is the stage used for country 'galas': 2 hour performances by each country including music, dance, and skits to share their culture with the rest of the school.

Turns out that in addition to the thousands of students studying medicine for free in Cuba from across the Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, there are over 100 US students studying medicine in Cuba under the same scholarship, thanks to Fidel Castro's generous offer to extend scholarships to US students who want to work in underserved communities and the efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). As someone who has wanted to study medicine for a long time, wants to work in under-served communities, but is quite concerned about the debt from a US medical school, I applied and was accepted to the program.
My group of 36 students from Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Paraguay, Panama and El Salvador

The beach in front of ELAM.

I had an amazing semester at the gorgeous campus of ELAM, a former naval base right on the ocean. I met students from across the hemisphere, learned a tremendous amount about my own country, and became extremely inspired by the school, its mission, and the students who study there. I also developed a deep admiration for the Cuban medical system in which each neighborhood has a small clinic staffed by a doctor and a nurse working to facilitate health rather than just treat illness. My space in the dorms. I had the top bunk and a locker to store my things.

In the end, however, I decided to accept a different offer -- at the University of California, San Francisco. It was an extremely hard decision to make, and in the end it came down to rather ordinary considerations -- the program in the US is a few years shorter and it is easier to stay in touch with friends and family. I know that I could have been happy and become a very good doctor had I chosen to stay in Cuba, and a big part of me wishes that I were doing just that. It was so hard to have to chose between two worlds, when I feel so strongly that the tremendous divide between developed and developing countries should not exist.

Successes come in pairs

2009-01-28T08:42:00.001-08:00

Check out more pictures from this trip and past trips at: http://picasaweb.google.com/kendradey/

Our January trip to Ecuador ended up being as successful as I could have possibly imagined. We finished installing nine rainwater tanks in La Encañada. An example is shown to the left. They consist of a bamboo gutter, a covered 550 liter plastic water tank on a platform, and the necessary hosing and adapters to deliver that water to the bathroom toilet and sink and a kitchen tap. We installed these systems over the course of six days of community work and for under $1,000 total budget.

We made laminated versions of these signs and put them up in every household to remind them how to maintain their rainwater tanks, how to use the secure 8 liter drinking water storage containers we provided, and how to dose each of them with the right amount of chlorine to have 100% safe drinking water.

On the last tuesday before we left, we went to the mayor of the Mera Municipality, which includes both La Encañada and Santa Ana, and presented a report on the work we had done. Basilio later reported that he felt the mayor was floored by the document, and he promised to provide all of the materials should they want to do such an installation in another community. I think he probably will too, since it is such a great deal for him -- give around $1000 worth of supplies (a fraction of the usual tens of thousands of dollar infrastructure projects they deal with) and have a community feel like the mayor has really done something substantial. It's a great deal for us too: the Santa Ana technical team gets all of the expensive supplies paid for, and Sacha Yaku only has to provide a small amount of administrative funds and pay for the time put in by the technical team -- expenses that the municipality is not willing to or able to make.

The technical team in Santa Ana is already getting requests for water quality testing, hygiene and health workshops, and rainwater tank installations. They are working on a proposal right now for a small community that sits in between La Encañada and Santa Ana called Chinchayaku. Although one never can tell with these things, the mayor is in office until April and wants to make communities happy in order to get re-elected, so I think it is quite likely that this project will go through!

And all of that is merely the first of our pair of successes. The other success is in Santa Ana. Not only do they continue to have water all day everyday, but we also manage to close off that pesky channel the water was escaping through in the river intake. What took us weeks during the first summer in Santa Ana (2006), took us three days this time. And it is a good thing it only took three days, because three days was all we had! We literally poured cement on Wednesday, came back to Santa Ana for the traditional 'despedida' or goodbye party, and then left at 6am on Thursday morning. Here are some photos of the operation:

(Hauling rocks and sand through a swamp and up a hill to the river intake. Men and women worked together to carry several cubic meters of material up the hill for this wall.)

(The temporary dam of sticks and plastic we built in order to have a dry place to build a concrete wall)(The construction scene)

(Jesus Moya finishes off the concrete wall)

So Santa Ana has clean drinking water, so does La Encañada, and we hope that it is only a matter of weeks before Chinchayaku does as well. Not bad for one trip.

Clean water for a new community

2009-01-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

A short update from the amazon rain forest of Ecuador.(This is the group I am working with - Emily, Nicole, Fatima, Kendra, Dorothy)

We've spent about 5 days now in La Encañada, a new community with just nine families. (The moon rises over La Encañada)

Turns out we'll be able to give them all water systems from the start. There are fewer families, the local government chipped in some money, we got a little extra from the MIT Public Service Center, and suddenly we have enough funds to make it happen!

Its a funny thing – we know were doing our job right when we are essentially superfluous. The team we have put together from Santa Ana is amazingly capable – with everything from leading planning meetings, to selecting the right trees to cut down for platform construction, to teaching basic hygiene to children in the school, to leading a water and health workshop in the whole community. (One of the platforms we've built for the rainwater tanks)

It is a pleasure to sit back and watch them work, mostly speaking to the members of Encañada in their native language Kichwa. They mix in enough spanish words and ive picked up enough Kichwa that I can mostly tell what they are saying. Every once in a while i'll make a suggestion , like why dont we install one tank today so we are sure we know how to do it, and Basilio, or Melida, or Esteban will jump on the idea, start speaking to the others in Kichwa, and they'll act on it.

That's not to say that I have been completely useless – the other day I unclogged a toilet that hadn't worked for two years. The family was pretty elated since they had been just going out in the woods for all this time. Its the little things that count…

I have to confess that the performance of both the Santa Ana team and the 9 families that make up the community of Encañada has exceeded my expectations.

Melida and Esteban did a fantastic job on the hygiene and health workshop, with only a little coaching from me. A bit more work on project management and documentation skills, and a bit of funding, and I think this team could really go into a new community and give clean water.

Tomorrow we have the day off and one of hosts in Encañada is taking us on a hike up to a hill from which we are supposed to be able to see santa ana : )

In Santa Ana once more

2009-01-26T11:52:00.000-08:00

I´m back in Santa Ana Ecuador for the fifth time now, this time with four other students and big plans to form a team from Santa Ana that will help other communities implement individual rainwater tanks. It rains so much here that 500 liter tanks are big enough that families have enough water for drinking and cooking almost all the time, and the tanks are around $80 each so it is a pretty reasonable price to provide clean, accessible water (we´ll be running hoses from the tanks with a little faucet on the end which they can put in their kitchens, which are usually separate structures from their houses with thatched roofs and a fireplace to cook on).

On January 6th we leave Santa Ana for one of their neighboring communities, La Encañada to implement five of these systems along with the team we have formed in Santa Ana. Then these families will pay back the cost of the system over a year so that the community can buy 5 more, etc. There are only 15 families in La Encañada, so after 2 years they´ll all have the systems.

As for the community water system in Santa Ana, it has its problems but they are way more minor than they were before. The new operator is this amazing 15 year old boy named Inoc, the son of Melida, one of the most responsible women in Santa Ana, so we are really excited about the community´s choice. (Inoc and Kendra fixing a leak in Santa Ana)

We´ve been working with him over the last 3 days and we´re getting pretty close to fixing up almost all of these little problems -- an amazing improvement over trips past. Slowly but surely Santa Ana is getting a handle on how to operate and maintain this system.

(Inoc standing at the river intake. Notice the semi-crooked wall in the background (the wall we built during the summer of 2006) and the water escaping to the front (where we need to build another such wall)

I love being back here. I love the people, the place, and this crazy water system that we´ve patched together over and over again. Santa Ana feels like a second home by now, but there are always new things to do and learn. It was my first News Years Eve here so I got to see how they build and burn life size dolls as a symbol of forgetting the past, then dance all night long. We made it till 4 am before we went to sleep.

Then last night we went hunting toads by moonlight on the other side of the Pastaza River. The technique is to listen to their calls and track them very quietly, then shine a flashlight on it once you are close enough and grab it with your hand. It was so beautiful under the stars and the moon, wading through shallow pools that form on the bank of the river. I think today we´ll get to eat frog maito (maito is a traditional way of cooking fish or birds or other kinds of meat wrapped up in a bananna leaf and cooked in the fire).

(On our day-trip to La Encañada, we brought a computer donated by TecsChange. These are some photos of its journey -- by horse).
(And by canoe).

Business as Unusual Art event series

2008-10-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos from the first art event in the series we have been organizing as a collaboration between the MIT Western Hemisphere Project, Sustainability@MIT, Global Poverty Initiative, and artist Cindy Snodgrass.

This is the gorgeous outdoor sculpture that goes with the event.

As participants arrived (mostly students, parents, and siblings considering it was Family Weekend at MIT) we had them spin a wheel to find out where they would be re-born according to actual income distributions in the world.

40% of people live on <$2 a day
40% live on $2-10 per day
19% live on $10-$150 per day
1% lives on >$150 per day ($54,750 per year)

Then they get a packet about a family with about that income level somewhere in the world and learn about the food they eat in a week.

With this information, they added to a growing collage featuring a map of how climate change is going to impact agriculture in the world.

Here is one of the resulting hexagons.

Then they started stamping shirts, cloth grocery bags, and fabric pieces with stamps related to food and water. Here are some more photos.

This will later get sewn up into a hand-made grocery bag.

A father looking on as his daughter stamps.

Stamping onto a bag made of the burlap from a coffee sack brought in from Latin America. We have burlap sacks from Costa Rica, Colombia, and Brazil among others.

Sun Tea at MIT

2008-09-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back at MIT for my last semester here. It's a different sort of semester, first of all because it is my last, and secondly because I'm only taking two (straightforward) technical classes to finish my major, along with the 3 HASS (Humanities Arts and Social Sciences) classes I need to finish out the 8 that MIT requires. They are a lot of fun -- Concensus Building for Sustainable Development, How to Stage a Revolution, and Social Documentaries -- and I feel like I am getting a taste of the liberal arts college experience to have all these reading and discussion based courses and few of the problem sets for which MIT is famous.

Here is 77 Massachusetts Avenue (the main entrance to MIT's infinite corridor), as seen from Froy and Fernando's room. It's not quite the view I had this summer on Pine Ridge, but still, it could be a lot worse.

It's always an adjustment to come back to MIT; it seems so artificial and contrived after being in places where everything is less neat and tidy but so much more real.

Still, life is good. Fernando and I found some nice glass bottles at Goodwill and have been making sun tea in the windowsill. I never realized how little sun we actually get in dorm rooms at MIT, what with all the clouds and buildings and lack of a front or back porch (Froy and Fernando live on the 4th floor), but still, it seems to work pretty well!

For those of you who know my sister Lexie, she has just started her freshman year at Colby College in Maine. And my brother Trav just got married at the end of August. Here's a photo of me with my siblings, father, and grandmother at the wedding.

At the end of August after the wedding, my Dad and I drove out to Maine with Lexie to drop her off at Colby, and then Dad, Froy and I went canoeing in Maine for three days. We had perfect weather and Froy got to see some of the animals of the north woods -- moose, loons, herons, bald eagles. Here are some photos:

Froy and I

A color-enhanced sunset over Lobster Lake (digital cameras these days are something else)

Froy, Dad and I attempting to fit all three of us in a self-shot picture

Dad kayaking past one of the two moose we saw in three days.

Looking forward, something I am excited about it is an art event we are organizing for Family Weekend at MIT about food, climate, poverty. The MIT Global Poverty Initiative are challenging people to try to eat on $2 a day for a week to get a sense of what it is like for the 2.5 billion people in the world with a daily income of $2 a day or less. And unfortunately, Climate Change is going to make it even harder for subsistance farmers in some of the poorest parts of the world (check out this map). The idea is to spread awareness about these issues, and how our lifestyle choices here impact others around the world, through painting and collaging with people who come to the event.

On a final note, my medical school applications are in for the Latin America School of Medicine in Cuba, along with a bunch of US schools. I'll be doing interviews throughout the semester and hopefully wind up with a couple of offers to chose from. Meanwhile, I'm dreaming up ideas for what to do with my 8 months between graduation and September should I not end up starting medical school in Mexico or Cuba...

Back home again

2008-08-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

Being back home isn't quite so different as I thought it'd be. For one thing, I'm still cooking with fresh garden vegetables: my mom and I just made some amazing bruschetta with some basil and ripe tomatoes from her garden.

And here we are: my mother/cooking mentor and myself just about to dig into our meal.

For another thing, if I get a toothache I can still harvest some toothache medicine (echinacea, or purple coneflower) since my mom has it planted in her wildflower garden.

And yes I have tried it out, a couple of weeks into my stay at Mike's house near Wounded Knee. Allison and I had gathered a bunch of roots, washed them and dried them, and I was curious exactly how it would numb my mouth if I tried chewing on the root. Mike later told me I probably took about four times as much as I should have, so the result was a bit interesting:

The summer comes to a close

2008-08-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

6:00 am this morning I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin. That's pretty much exactly 24 hour after I left Lonesome Valley, with the sun just beginning to rise and bathe the rolling hills in warm yellow light. I knew then just how much I'd miss the place.

My last weeks on Pine Ridge Reservation were quite amazing; things seem to have a way of coming together at the last minute. Literally on my last day at work, Wednesday, Bob and I were able to meet with some of the administrative leadership at Oglala Lakota College and everyone was very supportive of working to get the college lab certified to run water quality tests for the tribal and federal programs on the reservation. Now the lab staff will be able to move forward, hopefully with the help of some chemistry-inclined MIT students in the future. [Photo is of me wearing a random pair of sunglasses we found while inventorying the lab storeroom].

Things also seemed to fall into a good place with the watershed management project. On two separate days I went out and visited Wounded Knee and Porcupine Creeks with a couple of staff members from the Environmental Protection Program -- we took samples, photos, video, and talked about the various natural and human impacts on the creeks, as well as a fair bit about music and life. One thing that the long driving distances are good for is conversation time. Later, we played with maps and video and sound back at the office in Windows Media Maker (first time I learned Windows had a pretty decent equivalent for iMovie on a mac). All in all I felt like I really did help out with the watershed management plan, mostly by contributing some legwork but also with some ideas for how to move forward on such a large undertaking. It was really rewarding to be working collaboratively with people rather than endlessly pounding away on my computer.

The marvels of radio and buffalo tongue

2008-08-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Here are two fun stories that happened a few weeks back, but I still think they are worth sharing.

Radio
When we first moved in with Norma in Pine Ridge, we wanted to keep listening to Kili radio so we moved a boom box from a bedroom into the kitchen. We plugged everything back in and discovered that it was only working on and off... Some further experimentation revealed that the problem was the antenna -- if one of us was touching it, or even had our hand near it, it worked perfectly. If we took our hand away, it cut out. Check it out in the following video:

I was quite impressed, first that the human body makes such a good antenna, and second by how far the electric field could travel from us to the actual antenna through air.

Obviously, though, we needed a larger antenna, preferably something other than ourselves, since it would get rather tedious to stand next to the radio all evening. We proceeded to try larger and larger metal objects -- a clotheshanger, a piece of aluminum, a deep frying basket, with no success until finally we got a long metal pole, which seemed to do the trick [see photo]. Of course, now the only problem are the dogs who routinely knock it over.

Buffalo Tongue
The other fun story is when we went over to Mike Her Many Horses house to eat buffalo tongue. He had boiled two tongues and let us watch him prepare them. First you boil them, then peel off the top layer of skin with a knife, then slice the meat. You eat it by itself like a steak or with mustard.

The meat was absolutely amazing. And this coming from someone who is a vegetarian at home. It was definitely the best meat I have ever had in my life -- imagine the most tender steak you have ever eaten and make it three times as tender with just as much flavor.

As Mike mentions in the video, the sad thing is that historically huge quantities of buffalo were hunted and killed just for their tongues, others for hides, and others just to deprive various American Indian tribes of their source of sustenance and force them to surrender. It is hard to overstate the tragedy and injustice of the slaughter of buffalo by white Americans, especially when contrasted with the tribes' practice of killing only what they needed using every part of the animal. [Photo: Allison tries out the very tip of the buffalo tongue]

There are some free range buffalo farms out here, and we've been told that buffalo are much easier on the land and creeks than cattle -- they don't trample through and destroy the same stream bank the way cattle do. [If you are interested in the history of Buffalo, see this page]. It is as if bison still have the knowledge of how to live in harmony with their environment, in a way that cows (imported from Europe) do not. Of course there are many ways to make cattle farming easier on the land as well, which is something that many groups are working on promoting.

Watershed management

2008-08-10T13:27:00.000-07:00

The project that I have been working on for the last couple of weeks, and will continue to work on for the next two weeks, is assisting the stream quality personnel in the tribe's Environmental Protection Program with the preparation of a watershed-based management plans for two small creeks: Wounded Knee Creek and Porcupine Creek.

They are both two little prairie creeks that run north to join the White River. In general, they have very good quality water, although the levels of some nutrients and minerals exceed state water quality guidelines for surface waters. They are beautiful little streams, with a healthy border of shrubs and trees running alongside the creek on either side as they meander through a mostly grassy region, then into the badlands, and finally into the White River.

The idea behind the watershed based plan is to focus on a geographical area that is small enough that efforts to improve management practices (such as fencing and watering stations to keep cattle out of the creek beds) will have a real impact and improve the quality of the creek -- making the water clearer, allow it to support more fish, etc. Here are some photos of different types of land use in the watersheds with more information about the project and my role.

I have been helping to pull all of the existing data into one place so this week we can sit down and look at trends in the water quality parameters over time and over the course of the stream. The next step will be matching that to the likely sources of contaminants in the watershed. Because of how sparsely populated this land is, relatively speaking the watershed is in very good condition.
Communities are so small here that many have a total retention pond as their wastewater treatment system, some of which are very near the creeks. The Environmental Protection Program monitors the water in the creeks before and after these ponds to find out how much of an impact they are having on the creeks.

The other big thing I am helping with is generating a list of potential community partners and helping the staff develop outreach information and materials for getting community input and forming partnerships.

I just made this video as an example of what they can do with a digital camera and imovie. I would love to work with them to make a slightly longer video with their voices, videos, photos, and comments that they could use to initiate and focus the conversation at community meetings.

A new car & hiking in the hills

2008-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

We've got a new "rig" that we are driving around these days, and it is quite a good one. Automatic, good engine, good breaks -- we're quite happy with it!

But, being a reservation car, it has to have some quirks, right? Well, all of the doors on this car are one-way. All of the inside handles are broken off. With a little finesse, the front passenger door can be open from the inside, but that one also happens to be the one where the outside handle is broken off -- making it a one-way door as well. The other three must be opened from the outside or by rolling down the window and reaching over.

The other quirk is a fun one -- the key got stuck inside so it requires a pliers to be started, as seen in this video. Also in the video are some shots of our drive through the black hills around the twisting turns and one-way tunnels on "iron mountain road" on the way to our hiking spot.

We ended up climbing up a rather spectacular rock face. Here is the view from the top. During my day in the hills I couldn't help but be reminded how the Black Hills were a spiritual haven for the Lakota people. The hills and rockfaces covered in ponderosa pine forest are truly spectacular. Along with the massacre at Wounded Knee, the sale of the Black Hills in violation of the 1868 treaty is still very much in the minds of people on Pine Ridge Reservation as a symbol of the historic oppression of their people at the hands of the US government.

And to close, here's a nice picture of the four of us who climbed it (left to right): Stephan, Allison, me, and Al.

Cars on PIne Ridge Reservation

2008-08-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

I promised to write the next post about cars, so here it goes.

The take-home message here is really that people are extremely generous with their cars -- so many people have lent them to us on the spur of the moment and it's hard to imagine that happening in many other places in this country. The other take-home is that it really is true that people out here generally have some 3-4 cars just so they can keep one working. Stephan claims that most of the cars here would never be allowed on the roads in Germany...

And now, here's the story...

First we were supposed to borrow a car from the tribal government for the summer, but since we are not tribal memebers we couldn't use their insurance so that plan fell through. But, alas, you can't get anywhere around here without a car so we started borrowing various cars from our different host families and extended families.

Car #1: Mike's old red truck

The first one was an old red truck, featured in our last video. I have no picture of it, unfortunately. We drove it for the first time when we were still very unfamiliar with directions and made some wrong turns, mooing all the way...

Features:
-> Makes a distinct mooing noise with every turn
-> Blinker does not click in and out, you just have to guess whether or not you have the blinker on or not
-> Automatic, which means I can drive it
-> Does not indicate on the dashboard whether you are in Neutral, Drive, or Reverse, etc (you just count, like I do in the video)
-> Seat cannot move forward far enough for Allison to reach the pedals, so I was the exclusive driver of this vehicle
-> A good 30 degrees of free play at the top of the wheel (you turn the wheel 15 degrees in either direction and the wheels stay straight)
-> Fuel gauge reportedly bounces around once it gets below 1/4 tank, so you don't know when you'll run out of gas

And we discovered a new one when we were proactive in dealing with the last of these 'features' and took it to a gas station. The entrance to the gas tanks has been dented so it only takes gas if you feed it in a little bit at a time.

Car #2: Mike's new red truck

We borrowed this one for a week or two, and it is by far the nicest car we have had out here. Thankfully it was the one we drove up to Rapid City to pick up Stephan and visit Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse.

I have no picture of this one either, but here's a neat one of it's tailgate after we just passed under a pretty bridge.

Features:
-> Manual (but the seat moved forward!) so Allison drove it
-> In great condition
-> It takes $80 to fill up the tank and we sure burned through it in a hurry
-> Stephan was so shocked when we picked him up in this vehicle, since it is about three times the size of most cars in Germany

The surprise feature that we only found out after Mike got back from a week trip to Kansas City is that the oil leaks and we were supposed to check it every few days. Oops. Luckily it kept running fine. I guess no car can be perfect out here.

Car #3: Bob's white station wagon
Once we moved into Pine Ridge with Bob's mom, we started borrowing a small white station wagon Bob had recently gotten up and running again. Apparently he bought it for $100 a while back and has put some $300 of parts into it. In the video, notice the difference in how Bob handles the cows compared to how we did...

Features:
-> Automatic, so both Allison and I can drive it. Stephan has never driven an automatic before, so he preferred not to drive it.
-> The brakes are really delayed and weak. One must drive very cautiously.
-> Does not accelerate well when going up hills
-> The battery doesn't disconnect when the car is off so you have to manually open the hood and pull it off each time you park, then fiddle with it until it can start the motor when you want to go again.
-> The air conditioner gave out while we were driving. We were advised to drive fast over speed bumps to try to knock the wire back into place
-> There is no dipstick for the oil

It started making weird noises one day, so we put in a quart of oil. The noises went away but we started spewing blueish smoke. Turns out we were burning oil. This cycle repeated until we realized we were buring oil faster than we could put it in and we left the car at a guy named Tim's house. This was probably a good thing since we later found out that the break lines were filled with power steering fluid rather than brake fluid and that this supposedly eats away at the rubber in the breaks and destroys them...

Car #4: Tim's "trash truck"
Ditching the white car at Tim's house left us without a way to get back to town, so Tim lent us his "trash truck." It is called the trash truck only because they use it to take trash to town, but it is definitely the oldest car I have ever driven.

Features:
-> No blinker
-> Automatic, but also doesn't tell you what gear you are in, although I have gotten rather used to that by now!
-> No key required to start the car. It must be started by flipping a switch that Tim wired into the car himself
-> No key required to open the door. You don't even need to push down the button, just pull on the handle and it opens
-> A good engine and good brakes!
-> It leaks power steering fluid, so you have to keep filling it up with that
-> It has the loosest wheel I've every touched -- not free play like the other truck. I turn it all the way around when making right and left turns at stop signs.

One day the latch mechanism in the door suddenly started working again, so we had to break into the car with a butter knife (by unscrewing the triangular shaped window pane, rolling down the main window, and unlocking the door). Other than that we haven't had too many adventures with this car, which is a good thing.

Car #5: Bob's blue "boat"
We've never actually driven this car, but we have ridden in it. I is a huge old Chevrolet and really feels like a boat when you are riding in it, sailing over the waves of grasses blowing in the wind....

Car #6: Bob's green station wagon

Bob's almost got this one fixed up and we'll likely be using it soon so we can give Tim his trash truck back. He says it works great, it is just missing a door handle on the front passenger side. We'll take it : )

Lady, the great dane

2008-08-05T15:58:00.000-07:00

Some fun pictures of lady, the Great Dane we are dog-sitting

She's a very large dog...

Lady always likes to sleep with her legs up in the air. It makes for some pretty awkward looking sleep positions.

Pow-wow and Indian Rodeo

2008-08-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend is Pow Wow weekend on Pine Ridge Reservation, which means the town of Pine Ridge has increased in population by many thousands who have come to join in on the carnival, pow-wow, and rodeo, along with basketball and baseball tournaments, lots of food, and plenty of traditional arts and crafts for sale. It has been a really neat time for me to see so many different people, especially all the young people, coming together to celebrate Lakota culture, both modern and traditional.

Here are a few videos I've captured to give you a taste. I'll try to edit up something nicer in the future:

First off, on Friday evening, we went to the "Indian Rodeo" where we witnessed a whole host of tricks involving horses, calves, steers, and bulls. Bull Riding was probably the most exciting and impressive, although I also like the racing events and Junior Bareback, where young boys and girls clung onto the backs of bucking horses. They call time after 6 seconds, which gives you an idea of how challenging it is to stay on!!

The particular video I included is of "Team Roping" where one cowboy has to secure the calf's head with his lasso and then the other one has to secure his hind legs. 5 seconds are added to your time if you only get one back leg instead of both.

Later on Friday evening, and Saturday evening as well, we went to the Pow-Wow. It is really something to experience -- a huge donut-shaped roof shelters onlookers and drummers from sun and rain while the dancers compete in the middle. The music is provided by a whole range of drumming groups that sit in circles intermixed with the crowd itself. Someone goes around with a microphone from group to group, and wow are those drums loud when they are played right next to you! This video should give you some idea of the experience. Although the lighting and quality are not that great, you can see the drumming/singing group in the beginning with one kind of dancing -- Men's fancy dancing. Just like in the rodeo, they have a whole bunch of different categories and judges to evaluate the dancers' performances. Later in the video there is a bit of hoop dancing and a shot of the very end of the pow-wow where young and old alike came forward and danced together.

Good news in Politics

2008-08-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd share some links to items of good news in politics that have come into my inbox in the last few days:

1) On Wednesday, the Massachusetts house passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (a brief news story can be found here). "The bill empowers the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs to regulate green house gasses from all sources across the commonwealth" and "mandates a reduction of 80% below 1990 levels by the year 2050." The senate already passed a different version of the bill and the governor is expected to sign it, so it is very likely that Massachusetts will become (at least) the sixth state to have such a bill (California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington, and Connecticut already have similar legislation, and there may be others I am not aware of.)

2) Today the MA Senate passed a "Green Jobs Bill," which had also previously passed the house. The bill creates a center and grant programs to support job creation and job training in green energy. Some aspects of the bill are along the lines of Van Jones' work of targeting low income and minority workers to get training in "green collar" jobs.

3) In other good news, the FCC ruled today that Comcast was in violation of Net Neutrality in disrupting users person to person file transfers and ordered them to stop this practice. I am not at all an expert on this issue, but as I understand it, the ruling was the first major test of whether the FCC could and would interfere when an internet provider selectively blocks or slows traffic. Here's an article about it for more information.

Water, Wind, and tomato sauce

2008-07-29T19:02:00.001-07:00

Sacha Yaku, the organization my mom and I founded to support the community water system in Ecuador, has been invited to speak at the Boston opening of the film "Flow." As a bit of reciprocity for them helping us get the word out, I figured I would post a link to the film's trailer on youtube. While the film is overstated in saying that the world is "running out of clean water," it is definitely true that access to clean water is a huge problem in the world, and one that is predicted to increase with climate change. And, as always, it is the people with least access to money and resources who are, and will be, hit hardest. The fear of corporate control of water may also be a bit extreme, but it is based on hard examples, such as this one: CocaCola pumping so much water for their Coke manufacturing plants in India that nearby village wells dry up. That fear is an unfortunate reality for many communities.

And back here on Pine Reservation, at Oglala Lakota College (see sign above), today was another good example of how often our role as "fellows" in underserved communities often consists more of putting pre-existing pieces together than in creating new ones. The other students that I am working with have been focusing on developing the wind resources on Pine Ridge Reservation. They had been asked to look into ways to get 50 meter meteorological towers (met tower) set up on the reservation with anemometers (instruments that measure wind speed) to investigate the wind resource at several locations predicted to be "hot spots" based on regional models. Today, during Al's tour of Oglala Lakota College, we got to get up close to this met tower, which was installed by OLC in 2004.

From a distance we all thought the tower was one of the short ones -- only 20 or 30 meters tall. That would be useful, but not nearly so useful as a 50 meter tower. The wind always gets stronger the higher up you go, so you can extrapolate from a 20 meter tower but it is much much better to get real data from up there. When we got to the base, we discovered a sign explaining that there were anemometers at 10 meters, 30 meters, and 50 meters on the tower!

[Photo: Allison, Al, and Stephan at the base of the tower]. Unfortunately the professor who initiated the project has since left OLC and Al doesn't think anyone else has taken up the mantle. Stephan suggests we look into whether it would be possible to move the tower to another site--now that they have a few years of data here there is not much point in keeping it in the same place. And boy do they have data: an average wind speed of 7 m/s = 16 mph makes it a class 4 wind site.

This is the view of Oglala Lakota College from the base of the tower. It is actually a really neat place -- today we saw the TV production department, the library, the war memorial, and the historical center, which was amazing.

And to close, some fun pictures...

In our inventory of lab equipment, we ran across some amusing items. My favorite were the "CapSeal Bullet Ferrules" -- apparently they are used to seal off capillary tubes or some such thing.

Here is Allison attempting to come up with a good name for the glassware she has unearthed -- it looks more like a cow udder than anything else.

And, to keep this blog a bit more well rounded, I figured I would include an embarrassing Kendra-moment shot as well -- the time I opened a can of tomato sauce and flung half of it onto my MIT shirt. That poor shirt has been through a lot in Ecuador, but this might top all of that mud and rain. Still, the chili I was concocting turned out rather tasty so I figure it was worthwhile in the end.

The lab at Oglala Lakota College

2008-07-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

I finally actually have a work-related photo -- Stephan and I in the lab storage area with Al, the lab director. We are rummaging around through equipment and supplies they have in storage to dig up some of the needed items for the parameters we hope to run.

Tuesday we plan to return to the lab to help Al inventory this room and at the same time find all of the supplies that will be relevant. It should be a really fun and productive day as we find and try DO probes, pH meters, and maybe even a cold vapor adaption to the atomic absorption spectrometer...

Beadwork on Pine Ridge

2008-07-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, my dad did a great thing for me. He figured out that I was somewhat creatively/artistically inclined and asked my art teacher what he should do. She said buy her some art stuff and get out of the way. And so it was that I grew up spending pretty much all of my free time making things -- jewelry, rock and pine cone paperweights, dream catchers, cards, what-have-you. I had a particular fascination with American Indian-inspired crafts.
A wall hanging from the room Allison and I are staying in.

So it has been a bit of a childhood dream come true to see all of the crafts out here. Women still keep up the tradition of making moccasins for newborn babies and for adolescent girls, and I often see women at the office, at Kili radio, working on a pair of moccasins. There are many other crafts around here too. One that I really want to learn is quillwork. This is what the plains Indians, and others, used before the arrival of glass beads from trade with Europeans. They dried and died porcupine quills and wrapped and stitched them onto moccasins, shirts, leggings, bags -- pretty much everything that they now decorate with beads. I think the results are simply stunning...
Image from: http://sustainablejewelry.com/img/earrings.jpg

I hope to learn to do this, at least the basics, before the summer is out. And I may be in luck since we have just moved in with a new family and our host is an expert in all these different crafts. For now, she is out of town for the week and we are taking care of her house and dog and playing around with bead work, since it is more simple and familiar.

Here's what I've done so far. Allison did a lot more of this kind of thing growing up than I did, so she has been teaching me some tricks of the trade as well.

Faces in the Rocks

2008-07-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Sunday we had to go to Rapid City to pick up another engineering student who will be spending the rest of the summer here. On the way we managed to capture this rather amazing photo:

Things really are wild out here in South Dakota -- horses, buffalo, cows, deer, rattle snakes, mountain lions, and the occasional brontosaurus!

In all seriousness, though, a lot of amazing dinosaur fossils have been found around here so dinosaur images, memorabilia, and models are rather abundant.

It turns out that Mt. Rushmore is about thirty miles from Rapid City , so we figured we ought to go check it out. The faces are quite impressive in person, with the whole rest of the mountain face beneath piled high with rubble. Each chunk was at one point meticulously blasted off with dynamite.
Taking advantage of the same trip, we also went and checked out the Crazy Horse Memorial. Although the sculpture is nowhere near finished -- only his face has any definition -- the memorial made a much bigger impression on me than Mt. Rushmore.

Here is how the carving looks now. It was started in the late 1940s and, when finished, will be as tall as the Washington monument. The idea came from a group of Lakota Elders who wanted to show that American Indians had great heroes too, like the white man's leaders being carved at Mount Rushmore. They found a sculptor by the name of Ziolkowski who was born thirty one years to the day after Crazy Horse died. Ziolkowski took up shop and, by himself, began blasting away chunks of the mountain. He has since died and now his wife and seven of his ten children continue the effort. The project has never received any federal funds because the creators believe it needs to come from the good will and support of individuals, not the government.

Here is the model of what the sculpture will look like when it is finished. There are no known photographs or portraits of Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota chief who helped defeat Custer in 1876 and then was bayoneted after surrendering a year later. The portrait is, therefore, a symbolic one--of one of the last Lakotas who never lived on a reservation, never signed a treaty, and never spoke English. In the sculpture he is gesturing along with one of his most famous quotes: "My lands are where my dead lie buried."

Although the statue is intended to be symbolic of all American Indians, it is kind of neat that Crazy Horse was an Oglala Lakota, the same group we are living with on this reservation.

It also turns out that there is a huge museum at the Crazy Horse Memorial. I absolutely loved seeing all the beaded moccasins, arrowheads, garments, baskets, quillwork, etc. I saw some amazing stuff from different tribes in Wisconsin, which was really fun. Those kinds of experiences always make me extremely reflective about the past, present, and future... about cultures, about cruelty...about the planet and our role on it...about the world and my role in it. I have no conclusions or words of wisdom except to know that it is something so important to grapple with, to seek to understand, and really just feel.

If you are still curious about Mt Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial, you can check out this interesting article I ran across about the two memorials.

oh so many chemistry protocols...

2008-07-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

Finally, a real "work" update. We have a couple of different projects going on, but our highest priority is to do the groundwork so that the tribe's community college, Oglala Lakota College, can process water and soil samples for various tribal programs. These include stream water quality samples, drinking water samples, and environmental soil samples.

We are working on preparing a report of sorts that we can take around to get feedback and buy-in from all the different groups involved. For the last few days I have been searching out EPA-approved protocols for around 50 different parameters and trying to match them up with the list of equipment at the lab to see how many of them can actually be done here. The NSF grant has gotten Oglala Lakota College an impressive array of equipment, so it seems like they actually have the capability to run the majority of the parameters needed, which is great. I'm starting to go a little dizzy from all the high tech machines and intensive chemistry protocols, though.

The big challenge is going to be the funding aspect and making sure that the income from the tests is enough to cover all of the cost of supplies, maintenance, and personnel. We are also working on figuring out how to make this a dual education and service initiative by exploring the potential for improving the college's lab course offerings and summer internship programs, with the goal of developing a training program for students to become technicians in this or other labs.

Meanwhile, however, the only real chemistry we've been doing has been kitchen chemistry. Last night I boiled some carrots and forgot a few in the water. In the morning the water had turned a rather bright green color. Check it out...

If anyone has any idea where this color came from I'd be very interested to know. Copper ions maybe??

Also, since we made sun tea again I thought I'd post a rather more satisfying picture of how the tea darkens.

Another project we are helping with is an ongoing project to re-design the solid waste management system for the reservation. They currently have nine transfer sites that everyone has to drive their trash to. They are hoping to be able to switch to a household pickup system which would be more convenient for people and facilitate a monthly fee to generate revenue for the waste management system. We are going to help prepare a GIS layer with all of the homesites, businesses, schools, and tribal and federal programs to figure out how many dump trucks are needed to cover the whole reservation.

Backyard food, drink, and sunsets

2008-07-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

This entry is mostly an excuse to share some beautiful photos, along with a few stories about the wonders to be found in the (rather large) backyard of our host family.

Here I am, armed with a shovel and a bucket on our expedition to gather some echinacea (purple cone flower) and timpsula (Lakota for prairie turnip). The prairie turnip is most abundant in June and was one of the staple foods for Lakota (Sioux) people here on the plains. They still gather it, dry it, and store it for many months to use in soups, etc. It is a root vegetable somewhat like a potato.

Here are some purple cone flowers and a picture of me holding the biggest root we dug on our first day. It is the root that is used as "tooth ache medicine" and the whole plant that is used in teas and in commercial cough drops, pills, etc.

Here is Alison holding a timpsula, and the chopped timsula we prepared after finding a grand total of four -- what can I say, it was the middle of July and quite a bit past prime timsula season.

We have taken to making "sun tea" on the back porch -- common practice around here. You take a gallon jar, put four or five teabags in it, and then let it sit out in the sun for an afternoon. It makes warm-ish tea that you can then mix with sugar and ice for a very refreshing drink.Here is a pretty little windmill -- commonplace on land used for ranching as they are used to pump water for cattle.

Another view of our house, this time in the light of the late evening with the moon above.

And finally, a sunset. I couldn't resist.

A little bit of perspective

2008-07-15T14:12:00.001-07:00

I've been wanting to do something for a while to give a sense of the geographic expanse of Pine Ridge reservation, of the beautiful rolling hills, grasslands, and badlands, and of the challenge the tribal government faces in providing services to such large region. So here it is, a cutout of Pine Ridge reservation to the same scale as a cutout of the state of Massachusetts. [If you are a wisconsin-ite and the Massachusetts comparison doesn't mean much to you, then know that the length of Pine Ridge Reservation is about the same as the distance from Mt. Horeb to Milwaukee.]

Imagine trying to organize trash collection and disposal for 26,000-ish people over such an area. Or deliver water. Or get out emergency relief. And just imagine how hard these people are hit by recent fuel prices when they have to commute to work or the hospital or the grocery store over such distances (there are plans in the works for a bus system but nothing exists yet). Food for thought...

Kili radio, labwork, and the badlands

2008-07-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Last Friday we accompanied Bob to Kili Radio, a 45-minute drive from the office. Bob spent an hour on the air discussing disaster preparedness, specifically for tornadoes. Apparently it is a big deal because the prefabricated "trailer houses" that many people live in around here are easily blown over in a tornado because they lack the foundation and basements that other houses have.

As a bit of a radio nerd myself (I host a weekly public affairs program called Spherio on MIT's radio station) it was a lot of fun to poke around and trade stories with the announcers. We listen to Kili radio a lot around here, and it plays a whole lot of different kinds of music, from pop, rock, and rap to country and oldies to pow wow music. I've really enjoyed listening to the traditional songs in particular, and some of them are even written and sung in English now as well as Lakota. I also love to hear all the local announcements for garage sales, parties, Indian taco sales, and puppies to give away. It reminds me of the announcements for parties on Radio Huayacocotla La Voz de los Campesinos as I always heard them in Mexico -- except that Kili doesn't tell you the time of day nearly so much as Radio Huayococotla, maybe because more people here have clocks and watches...

The station is beautiful, perched up on the side of this hill with a giant new wind turbines that will go online at the end of the month. Although small windmills for watering cattle are commonplace, this is the first wind turbine for electricity generation. The reservation has some of the best wind resources in the country and there are a number of proposals on the table for the tribe to develop commercial wind fields in the near future.

Last Thursday we went up to Rapid City for a meeting on solid waste management, a challenging issue for the tribe, but one they are really working to improve. On the way, we drove through a different side of the badlands -- at one overlook the immensity of the sandy buttes was distinctly reminiscent of the grand canyon.

And last but not least for this entry, yesterday we went to the main center of Oglala Lakota College outside of Kyle and talked to the staff at their laboratory. The lab has some incredibly nice equipment -- X-ray spectrometer, Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, an Ion Chromatograph, and a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer to name just a few. The equipment came through a NSF grant, but they have a much harder time getting "soft" money for salaries of lab staff, etc. Right now there is only one full time person in the lab, with some interns for the summer. So our next big task is figuring out how much money could be generated by running samples for tribal programs to see if it is economically viable to support the staff, supplies and equipment maintenance that would be necessary. As always, the technical issues are dwarfed by the economic and organizational challenges...

Video from Pine Ridge

2008-07-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a short video that Allison and I made with photos and video clips of our first few weeks on Pine Ridge reservation working for the Oglala Sioux Tribe's environmental protection program.

So far, things have continued to be relaxing and entertaining. As always our project ideas have proved to be more complicated and problematic than first anticipated, so I'll update on that a little later when things evolve a bit more.

For now, enjoy the video update on some of the fun experiences we've had so far -- fourth of July fireworks, gathering Echinacea and Timsila roots, and learning to drive a quirky old truck and navigate gravel roads that all look the same.

Pine Ridge, South Dakota part 1

2008-07-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the Pine Ridge reservation in Southwest South Dakota three days ago. I am here along with one other MIT student, Allison Brown, to work as interns for the Oglala Lakota tribe's environmental protection program. We have spent the last few days mostly just getting our bearings, learning about all the different tribal programs and about the organizational structure and realities of the reservation.

We are living with a host family outside of Wounded Knee (yes, the Wounded Knee of the Wounded Knee massacre). As with most houses around here it is a small, perfect rectangular shaped one-story "trailer house," perched on a ridge overlooking a huge expanse of rolling hills with pine trees. It is absolutely stunning [The first photo is of the view from the back deck]. And since there is running water, a real mattress, a stove, and a washing machine, I feel like I'm living the high life after Ecuador. Michael Herd Many Horses, who we are living with, is a walking library of tribal history and is fascinating to talk with. [Second Photo is of the badlands from the drive in]

The office is in Pine Ridge, the only real population center on the res. It has one big intersection, a gas station, a couple of restaurants, two high schools, an IHS hospital, and all of the tribal government offices. It looks like we will be working on a couple of different projects -- one to get the Oglala Lakota College lab state certified to process water quality samples (that way the tribal programs don't have to drive up to rapid city to drop off samples at a lab there and they'll be able to keep the money on the reservation). The other one is investigating the impact of septic system drainage fields on water quality. [Photo is of me in front of the Environmental Protection Program office].

Yesterday we got a tour of the water infrastructure facilities for the reservation. Right now they use a network of groundwater pumps, water towers, and distribution lines. Chlorine and fluoride are dosed automatically into the inflowing water, and they run all of the standard water quality checks for US drinking water systems. It was amazing for me to see all this after working in Ecuador -- this is how a real water system is supposed to work! There are also about 300 families that aren't hooked up to the distribution system and are waiting to be added once a new surface water line is brought in from the Missouri River. For now, they get a 65 gallon tank of water delivered once a week. Considering how many people often live in the small homes on the reservation (10 or 12 is not uncommon), it has got to be a real stretch to make 65 gallons last a week. [Photo of PVC pipes with gaskets that auto-seal together instead of requiring glue. I have never seen these in Ecuador but they are standard here -- the tribe's Department of Water Maintenance and Conservation says they won't touch the ones with glue fittings because they break down after 10-15 years. Bad news for Santa Ana]

Tomorrow will be my first 4th of July in the US for a long time. We have the day off work and it is going to be interesting to see how the festivities proceed around here.

Some of you have asked about my plans for applying to medical school in Cuba -- so far there is little to report. I am still planning on applying (the deadline is the end of September) and continue to investigate the pro's and con's of this route as I continue to apply to American medical schools as well.

Ecuador 2008 - part 2

2008-07-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

It sounded so easy -- fill the filter from the bottom with water from the elevated water tower to alleviate air binding. It seemed even easier after we were able to get the entire bottom flow installation taken care of within the first three days of our stay in Santa Ana. We thought we could fill it up the next day and have lots of time to troubleshoot the slow sand filter and train everyone in the use of the chlorinator. But then we found a leak in the pipe that ran down to the filter. We patched it, and waited 24 hours for the glue to set. On the next attempt, part of our installation popped apart under the pressure (Noe and Esteban who had been doing the gluing of PVC parts had missed one section). Glue, wait, try again. Another part popped off, dumping the activated carbon on the ground. Glue, wait, try again. It holds. By then it was Thursday, and all day long we kept checking back, hopeful that we would see a layer of water rising up out of the sand bed. Nope.

It wasn't until Friday morning (our second-to-last day of work) that we finally saw water break through the surface of the slow sand filter, indicating that we had successfully filled it from the bottom. After much celebration we were finally able to put the filter back online along with the chlorinator. Luckily that all went smoothly and effectively, so the system is now officially working!

On Friday we also did a set of activities about water, bacteria, hand washing, and chlorine with the first through sixth graders at the elementary school in Santa Ana. The photo is of me explaining to some 1st-3rd graders how to measure chlorine using the test kits we left with them.

On Friday I was reminded of something that I am always underestimating -- how complicated the chlorination part of the process really is. The operator has to measure how many seconds it takes to fill a 10 liter bucket of water, use that to calculate the flow rate in liters per second, and multiply by 236 to find the number of milliliters of granulated chlorine required for three days. Then he/she must add 300 liters of water to the chlorinator along with the right amount of chlorine, and assure that the solution is dripping out at a rate of 100 milliliters in 86 seconds. Francisco did an admirable job of learning this process in the space of two days, Friday and Saturday, over which time we made him do the whole thing twice through.

Saturday night, as always, the community cooked up a big feast served on large banana leaves and strung out wires for a boom-box and two lightbulbs. With that we danced all night long -- everyone from grandmas to toddlers dancing to traditional Kichwa music and Ecuadorian cumbias, periodically interrupted by performances from various youth groups. Along with the usual traditional dances, this time we saw a few break dance numbers from some of the young boys in the community, spinning and twisting to some kind of rap in Spanish. Every time the wiring went bad for the boom box they would switch to the traditional drum dance with one man and one woman while they worked to reconnect the cables. I can truly say that these parties in Santa Ana are by far my favorite of any I have attended.

Ecuador 2008 - part 1

2008-06-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

I´ve been in Ecuador for the last 9 days or so with two other students from MIT, Fatima and Cassie. We have been working to advance the water project in Santa Ana while I mentor Fatima and Cassie in the technical and social aspects of this sort of work in a tiny rainforest community with unique customs, language, culture, and individuals.

Generally things have been going quite well. The water system functioned for about two months straight after Fernando and i left last time (February and March), which is unprecedented : ) Then the community lost electricity for two weeks and couldn´t use the pump, and it seems like the operator and water board kind of stepped back from that point on and left the system essentially not working. On Monday the community decided to scale down the water board and have the president of the water board be the same as the president of the community, and keep only the secretary and treasurer. The theory is that among fewer people they can coordinate better and avoid the problems of five people trying to run something. Given the people that are in these positions, i think it will work out well.

They also elected a new operator, Francisco Vargas. He is probably the most enthusiastic operator I´ve trained so far -- he has spent all day every day with us since acquiring the position and at the end of the day when we are getting tired it is Francisco who suggests something else that needs to be done. This gives me great hope for his ability to take responsibility and initiative to keep the system running.

We have installed a new connection to enable the community to fill the slow sand filter from the bottom. This is the proper way to initiate a slow sand filter and was never installed in this community. Last night we were finally able to start filling after days of acquiring misfitting parts and fixing this and that. Hopefully by the end of the day today it will be filled and they can put the filter into functioning again... Sorry about the low quality of my english. I talk about all these things in spanish so much that my mind is translating spanish to english instead of thinking in english. Sigh.. Anyway, we hope by this new connection we will eliminate air-binding and increase the flow rate of the filter.

We have taught the operator and the water board president (Telmo) how to use the coliform testing. While I make purchase some tools and supplies in town today, Fatima and Cassie are helping Francisco and Telmo teach others in the community how the testing works. They are all so excited to have this capability in the community, something that can´t even be done in Puyo! Francisco and Telmo made some very astute observations when they saw the results, and it never ceases to be a really powerful experience when they get to actually see the differences in quality between river water, rain water, ground water seeps, boiled water, and water with chlorine. They get to see how much cleaner rain water is if it is kept in an enclosed container with no way for people or animals to touch it as opposed to an open bucket where people dip in cups to extract water. They get to see how boiled water can also be contaminated if it wasn´t boiled long enough. And they get to see the sky blue paper of the water with chlorine.

In our house to house surveys (we have done over 20 so far) we have found that the majority of people are now in favor of using chlorine in the water system, which is a big change from the first summer we spent here. Overall, progress is slow of course but the change has been enormous since the first summer. I can tell the community now with confidence that they have the knoweledge and tools to make this system work, and they look back at me and know that it is true. There is nothing that can compare to knowing that I have been a part of such a process of transformation.

I have to go catch a bus. I will write again with some fun stories, for there are many.

Folding Bridge

2008-05-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

I just realized I forgot to write about one of the
coolest things that I did this semester: design and
build a ten-foot pedestrian bridge with my team in my
"senior"civil and environmental engineering design
class. We were tasked with designing a bridge that would
hold 2,000 lbs, but it could be any style we wanted.
Our group got inspired by  this bridge  and decided to
make ours a rolling bridge as well. But we flipped the
design upside down so that all of the bottom members of
the truss could be made out of cable (the bottom members
only act in tension, never in compression). This made it
so we didn't have to make any kind of bracing mechanism
for the bridge when it was extended. As you can see from
the pictures, the bridge turned out rather elegantly,
and successfully held 2,000 lbs.

From Ecuador to MIT

2008-02-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for making this so belated. I have a few things to update on -- the end of my time in Ecuador, a brief journey to Peru, and the start of a new semester at MIT.

First of all, Ecuador --

Looking back, the work we (Fernando and I, but actually more the community) accomplished exceeded my expectations. The water board really stepped up to take initiative and control of their water system. The first summer we were there, Froy and I had to lead the community along during meetings--teaching, guiding, directing the community practically every step of the way. But slowly they have learned to take on that role, and now know and understand the technical and administrative details such that Fernando and I hardly had to participate at all in the community meetings where they came together to make important decisions about the future of the water system. It was a real feeling of satisfaction to start to feel superfluous -- after all, that's the whole point!

At the end of the month, my mother came to Santa Ana for about a week. The whole community was extremely excited to host her, especially because she is now working with me to establish an ongoing "Art for Water" program to purchase ceramics and jewelry from the women in Santa Ana. The hope is to generate some income for the families, but also to bring the story of Santa Ana to the United States and raise money for the water system. It was a thrill for me to re-connect with my old artistic instincts -- the days back when I used to make all sorts of things with sticks, pine cones, feathers, and a pocket knife -- as I spent a few days learning and understanding the basics of their traditional art.

Check out this video I just finished producing that tells the story in a nutshell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K6lzmWYeUE
Also, if you haven't seen it yet, check out our website. I still need to update it based on the advances in January, but it still gives you the sense of what we are trying to do: http://www.sachayaku.org

Peru --

I went to Peru with the intention of visiting a clinic founded by an American doctor in the middle of the rain forest. I did get to see the clinic, and speak with the doctor about her experiences and perspectives, but what actually was the most amazing part of the trip was seeing the "deep jungle" that people in Santa Ana are always referring to. Santa Ana is higher in altitude, and mostly secondary forest, so it doesn't have the same trees, frogs, birds, fish as the interior. It was really hard for me to be in a touristy lodge with all sorts of services and amenities, but I did appreciate the chance to chat with communities in Peru and learn about how their communities and their environments differed from what has now become so familiar to me in Ecuador. People really opened up to me when I told them about my experiences in Ecuador, about the way my friends in Santa Ana eat particular foods or what they have taught me about different plants. I also got to see river dolphins, piranhas, poison dart frogs, ceiba trees and the like. The canoeist in me loved to see how the villagers all got around the area in dugout canoes.

Finally, MIT --

As you can expect, its a bit of a let down to be back to a world of problem sets, lecture halls, laboratories, and cement. I'm definitely over the hump, as they say, and feeling ready to start moving on from this place. Which is good, because I'm firming up plans to graduate at the end of next fall. Still, I hope to make the most of the opportunities I have here to meet amazing people, learn such diverse things, and be a part of some amazing projects. The big reason it has taken me so long to get this e-mail out is exactly because of one of those projects -- the environmental student group that Froy and I are a part of "Share a Vital Earth" just finished putting on a 3-day, campus-wide symposium on climate change. It has been exhilarating to see all of our hard work come together and for the event to get such great attendance, attention, and publicity. You can check out the events and related information on our website: http://climatechange.mit.edu

That's all for now. Its been a long time since I've heard from some of you so I'd love to hear a bit about what you are up do, how things are going, what you are passionate about these days.

Last but not least, I've uploaded some pictures on Snapfish for you to check out if you are interested: http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=232161203202315605/l=

351920988/g=25494886/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Love,
Kendra

a long overdue hello from wisconsin

2007-12-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

Its been a long time since i've written you all... mostly because this semester was a whole lot of problem sets, ten page lab reports, and studying for days on end for organic-chemistry exams, intermixed with a whole lot of wishing I had more time to spend on the things that I really care about.

But now the semester is over, and I'm home with family, which is really nice. I did manage to get a few meaningful things into the semester that are exciting and inspiring for me. One is that our bicycle-powered laptop has been placed in the campus gym where more and more people are using it. There are a few videos online about the bike that you can check out if you want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSX1Tf3wbQI

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=11673

The next is that on January 3rd I leave for Ecuador, to work with the same community on some lingering technical issues in the water system, as well as start a program (with the help of my mom) where we will purchase traditional ceramics and jewelry from the women in Santa Ana and sell them in the US as an income-generating program and to sustainably support the water system. We've almost got a website up and running for this project, so I'll send it out when we do!

The last thing is a three day symposium on climate change at MIT that Froy and I's environmental group have been organizing for february 2008... we're going to have about 15 events in all sorts of different departments with the goal of connecting and engaging students from all different disciplines to bring their energy and skills to bear on the challenge of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season with your families and friends.

With much love,

Kendra

P.S. As much as I think about the climate change issue, I couldn't resist including my latest thoughts on this for those who care to read them:

I have to say that is hard for me to remain optimistic about the future of our planet with climate change. The predicted consequences -- droughts, more tropical storms and hurricanes, flooding of coastal lowlands, etc sound like things we can adapt to, like we always have. And that may be true, at least for a while, for those of us who have enough money, insurance, status, etc to always ensure ourselves plenty of food to eat and a new place to live. But it is not true for billions of people in this world. These are the people who will be hit soonest and hardest, and ironically they have the least responsibility for the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.

Here's an excerpt from an article from the Guardian http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled/

He is quoting a UN report on the state of the planet:

“If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”

And that's really the problem... Hurricane Katrina, the droughts in the Southeast, Fires in the west... none of this things can be proven to have been caused by climate change, even though all the science says these sorts of events are going to come harder and faster as climate change progresses. So no one has the urgency to say "we need to do whatever it takes to reduce emissions 80% or 98%, and I need to do whatever it takes in my own life" (the number depends on whether you think all countries should reduce relative to the amount they are emitting now or relative to their population size). And no, I'm not a believer in climate change as a complete doomsday scenario. The world will go on, life will go on. The question is whose lives and what world?

Part of the paradox of environmentalism is that in the best case scenario we fix the problem and people should look back say "well what was the big fuss about?" We managed to do enough about CFC's that caused ozone depletion and Sulfur emissions from fossil fuels that caused acid rain to get those problems under control (to a certain extent, the problem is still around in other countries) such that looking back we might be tempted to say, what were all those environmentalists worried about? I hope that we manage to do enough about climate change that you all look back at this e-mail and think "why was she so worried?" But until the world and especially the united states really step up to the plate on this, I'll remain worried.

If anyone wants to contradict or debate, or talk more about this issue more, I'd love to talk with you -- just send me an e-mail!!

photos, anecdotes, and thoughts on life plans

2007-07-22T02:16:00.000-07:00

queridos amigos y familia (dear friends and family),

I'm writing with some thoughts about my future life path and with
some random anecdotes about mexico.

first the random anecdotes, things that I found curious at first and
come up regularly in conversation here because of course people find
our way of doing things just as curious.

1) Last names. The tradition here is that everyone has 2 last names,
first the (first) last name of their father and then the (first) last
name of the mother. Nobody changes their name upon getting married.
For example the daughter of father Juan Tellez Solis and mother Maria
Bautista Hernandez would be named something like Araceli Tellez
Bautista. Rather less chauvinistic than the traditional american
system, although the female line only lasts for one generation; you
still end up with the two last names of the grandfathers, never
grandmothers.

2) Naming newborns. It is common practice here to have a baby and
then take as much time as needed to name it...babies go weeks or even
months without a name -- they are simply called "baby" "cutie" "my
love" until the family decides on a name. The woman I saw give birth
has invited me over to her house a couple of times and the boy is 20
days old and still doesn't have a name. She lives in a 'city' but
cooks over a fire and lives with another sister and her mother and
all their respective children. its a really crazy, warm, wonderful
home with many aunts and uncles younger than their nieces)

3) Hospital records. A random note, but as a result of these naming
practices (and other reasons) the hospital records here are organized
by household, then by neighborhood. If the patient doesn't know their
household number, we have to look them up in the registries based on
how the children in that household are named (Tellez Bautista in the
above example). You also see infants records with the first name
written in later with a different color ink, etc, because the infant
didn't have a name when it came in for its first vaccinations, etc.

4) Signatures. Here, a signature is a work of art, with elegant
loops, squiggles, and dots. They usually includes the initials of the
person but never the whole name and are generally more circular/
square in shape than our long cursive-based signatures. People laugh
at my signature, the way I laughed at Froy's signature the first time
I saw it.

Now, the thoughts on my life path... I've been really loving working
at the hospital, learning a little more every day, teaching health
education classes, and chatting with patients as they wait to be seen
or for their treatment to kick in. I'm almost positive that I really
want to do this, I want to be a doctor, I want to have the knowledge
to promote health and treat illness. I am also sure that I want to do
this in an under-served community somewhere in the world and work
under a more comprehensive definition of health care that includes
things like environmental health, potable water, community relations.

How I will manage that remains to be seen, but one distinct
possibility is that I will study medicine here in Mexico, or in Cuba,
instead of in the US. The advantages would be avoiding $100,000 of
debt that I would accrue studying in the US (and be pretty much
locked into working in the US for a period of time to pay it off), I
would learn medicine in Spanish which greatly expands the countries
in need where I could work, and I'd avoid the arrogance and
bureaucracy of an American medical school... Of course there many
disadvantages and challenges, like getting permission from the US
govt to study in Cuba should I be accepted (check out the program, it
is AMAZING and would be a dream to study there: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medicine_(Cuba)
passing the entrance exam to a school in mexico (ie SAT in spanish
plus chemistry, biology, and mexican history).

Lots to think about, and its going to be an interesting choice... in
August i'm going to visit one medical school in Mexico with a friend
of Froy's so I can get a better idea of the reality of studying here.

Much love to all,
Kendr

ps check out the photos i've uploaded: http://www1.snapfish.com/
thumbnailshare/AlbumID=

166589375/a=25494886/t_=25494886

I think you have to make a snapfish account to see them...sorry about
that. It's free and I think you even get 20 free photo prints when
you join.

In Mexico for the summer

2007-06-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

Hi all, I know its been a while since I've written one of these updates so it is long over due.

Overall I had a really great semester, liked my classes, did meaningful things outside of them, etc. One highlight is that a lot of people are excited about the bicycle-powered laptop workstation that my group spent the semester building in a design lab I took. The campus gym now wants the bike and says they'd love to have more if we will make them.

I'm writing this from the heat of low-lying Huejutla in central Mexico, with a fan gently moving the hot air over my heat-rash speckled body. The original plan was for me to live here with Froy's family for the summer and volunteer at a nearby community clinic. The relevant officials have all been very eager to help me out but suggested that I really out to live within the community. Based on my experience last summer with the appreciation people in Santa Ana
demonstrated because we actually lived in the community, these officials make a good point.

So tomorrow, off I am again to another indigenous community, this time a Mexican one called Tecpaco and it's neighbor Calnali. Tecpaco is the community where Froy is working on his reforestation/agroforestry project and that's where I'll live, and I'll walk daily with the middle school children to the somewhat larger community Calnali and volunteer in the clinic there. I'm excited to get an inside window on what its like to work on the more clinical, medical side of the community health issue to help me decide if I want to be an engineer (and work on things like community water and sanitation systems) or a doctor (and work in community clinics and health promotion and training programs).

The bad news is there is no internet in Tecpaco so i'll be back to the rhythm of once a week access. The good news is that Tecpaco and Calnali are some 800 meters up into the mountains from here so the weather (I am told) is much cooler and more pleasant. And no worries
about the heat rash -- it's getting much better since I got some pills from the doctor and the room I will sleep in tonight has air conditioning. It was funny when I went to the doctor yesterday because he asked how long I (the fair-skinned wisconsin girl) was going to be staying in Mexico. His reaction to my answer that I'm staying for two and a half months was priceless.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll write again sometime once I'm into the swing of things.

All the best,
Kendra

Update: A return to Ecuador

2006-12-16T12:07:00.000-08:00

The semester is winding to a close... its been a different sort of semester, maybe more real and down to earth now that the glossy sheen on all the opportunities and crazy things happening at MIT has faded and I start to realize hugeness of complexity and challenge involved in efforts to make real change in the world. I am continually inspired by stories and people around me, and ever seeking to find my place in these groups, changes and movements that I believe in.

As most of you know I spent last summer in Ecuador, working on a potable water system in the small indigenous community of Santa Ana in the rain-forest region of Ecuador... As we worked to build a dam, teach technical and administrative skills to the water board and operators, and spread hygiene and health awareness in a world where boiling water is a multi-hour endeavor of wood hauling and fire-tending I realized in a really personal way the paradoxes of "international development" I learned that good will, energy, enthusiasm and effort are not all-powerful, but at the same time that coupled with patience and a truly open mind, they can still do something extremely worthwhile. If you are interested in reading more about our work in Ecuador, you can check out: http://web.mit.edu/mitpsc/

beyondtheinfinite/

The water is now flowing to the homes in Santa Ana, and along with Froylan, I am going back to Ecuador for the month of January to continue our work with community empowerment around their water system. This time we are hoping to work with the operators and water board that we have already taught and help them develop their skills and put together a program for them to do water hygiene and health workshops and well as technical training in other communities. One of the most striking things I felt while I was there was the oppressiveness of the paradigm of indigenous people asking for help and outsiders giving...a paradigm perpetuated both by indigenous communities and by well meaning governments, NGOs, and individuals such as our selves. We don't presume to be able to change this attitude in a month, but we would like to lay the foundation for a much more powerful type of capacity building than simply teaching them to run their water system -- teaching them that within their communities they have so much knowledge and power to share with one another.

For that reason, we are going to be working with an association of 33 indigenous communities that Santa Ana is a part of. The "Comuna San Jacinto" is based out of Puyo, the small city that is about 1.5 hours outside of Santa Ana, and works to attain legal land ownership recognition for the communities and facilitate some limited health and education sorts of programs in the communities.

here in Quito

2006-08-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

HI all,

I´m here in Quito, our flight leaves at 10pm tonight. You´d think we´d be hanging around with plenty of time to chat... instead we´re doing our utmost in this last time we have to leave the best archive of the water project that we can, and also working with Francisco, Esteban and Corinne to re-vamp the Ecuador Volunteer program in Santa Ana...creating forms, rewriting the webpage, writing up information for volunteers in Santa Ana etc.

This summer has been incredible in so many ways... i´ve soaked up a little bit of perspective on everything from the petroleum industry, logging, pesticides in agriculture, to some gritty details of water systems, the mess of beaurocracy in develpment projects, and the beauty of a day in the community of Santa Ana.

I´ll be writing up some more formal summaries and reflections as closure on the project for the Public Service Center that I´ll pass along to you all. I know I´ve gotten really short in these e-mails, my apoliogies for that. I´ve got lots of stories and photos to share...hopefully i´ll be able to put it together a bit on the plane.

Much love to all,

Kendra

Tungurahua -- we're safe and sound

2006-08-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

I don´t know if the news of the volcano eruption reached the news for any of you, but I wanted to say first of all that we´re safe and sound here in puyo along with the majority of the community.

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day. Another one of those days where I woke up 24 hours ago with a completely reality context than what I have now.

We attempted to build the wall yesterday.... despite our fears that few community members would come we had a good turnout and were all set to build, except froy returned empty handed from his quest for cement... all the stores had sold out and hadn´t gotten their new shipments because of the eruption of Tungurahua the night before took out the road between here and the cement factory.

We passed a normal afternoon and then firefighters and national guard trucks started coming with messages of increasing posibility of alarm.. Basically kilometers upstream from us the lava entered the Pastaza river and dammed it off in 3 places... causing the water level to rise 200 meters... crazy....

they are apparently going to try to break the dams with dynamite so that they dont break all at once and cause a huge flood of water downstream. Santa Ana is almost 100meters above the pastaza, and a good 100ish kilometers downstream, so the chances of anything happening to the community are miniscule.... It was a really surreal experience last night at the farewell party for some other volunteers, listening to the eclectic music they play around here, looking around at the half-lit faces of these people that I have come to know so well, knowing that a tremendous flood is within the realm of posibility. I think it made me really understand this latin american culture froy tries to explain to me... that this life is crazy, so many things to be worried about in our project, the village just might flood, the volunteers are leaving as volunteers always do, and the only natural thing to do is eat some heart of palm toasted up in a banana leaf, dance to old mexican reggaton, and gaze up at the stars.

Then, at 11pm or so, the national guard came again with a huge truck and this time a good half the community (including us) decided to go with into Puyo, just in case. It was a crazy experience, that 2 hour ride to puyo in the back of this huge truck, literally the refugee evacuation sort of truck... pitch black except for the ocaisional volunteer´s flashlight... women and kids and blankets all piled up along the walls and a few in the middle of the truck. Me with 6 year old sacha asleep in my lap, half leaning on froy, and the little girl that the man on my other side was holding also half resting on my arm... I felt just a little bit of the raw warmth and unity of humanity that people must experience in real war, flood, refugee situations. They´ve got set up here a really nice sort of temporary shelter thing, with individual matresses, blankets, and 3 meals a day. We don´t think we´ll be here long, another night at the most.

As for our project... that´ll be another update...

Much love. Miss you all and ww´ll be very careful and take care of ourselves here.

-Kendra

quick hi

2006-08-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

We´re plugging away here, with lots to do and the days we have left dwindling. We had a bit of confusion with the materials being dilivered at the wrong place, etc, putting us a bit behind in our construction, but after all that´s the part that the community really knows better than us how to do it, we´re just putting in a bit of organizational impetus to get it done. Hopefully the materials will come monday/tuesday and away we´ll go.

We have our operator candidates, and are going to start training them today when i get back with materials printed. The contractor is coming tuesday and claims the system will function when he leaves... from what we know, this is possible though i´m not quite convinced. There are about 8 other volunteers here right now, and i´ts pretty fun to see other people´s projects and how they are getting along.

Much love to all,

Kendra

things are looking up

2006-08-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

A quick quick word to you all saying that things are looking bright and wonderful...

Two days ago froy went with a few members of the water board to the president of the community´s house (an hour walk from main Santa Ana) to try to convince him that the community really needs to select and pay an operator, not have a rotational community system as he wants because based on our experience when only half of the beneficiarias come to the meetings, we don´t really think t´hey´ll walk 2 kilometers to go clean the captation in the river, etc... The president isn´t married, doesn´t have kids, and for that has his mind much more in the past than the future, and didn´t budge in his view. Then he said he didn´t have time to come the next day to the meeting of all beneficiaries...

So yesterday we had a wonderful meeting with the community. I didn´t actually attend much of the meeting because I was running around to people´s houses and up to a trail building project about a kilometer away trying to get the majority of beneficiaries to come to the meeting. I did : ) and they agreed to a salary of $60 a month for the operator and $20 a month for the treasurer (effectively almost tripling their tariff to about $5 a month per family (depending on use... $.63 per meter cubed) but assuring a successful system). Wahoo...

Other great news is that we have 4 new volunteers from spain (we had been told they were americas and were thrilled they are 4 college students from spain because they can SPEAK SPANISH, and they are here for 2 weeks working on sub projects of ours. I went with the secretary and president of the water board and one of these able, intelligent, hard working new volunteers Ana to the municipality where we cleared up our questions about the administrative end of things, so Ana and Ines are set to set up a simple system of accounting, book keeping, etc for the water board. The other two will be helping us continue our health and higiene habit campaign.

In other news... the other day the family hen was searching for a new place to lay some eggs and found ... our bed.... it was quite the funny incident, and later, a woman in the village said that it indicates that we´re going to have kids... hehe... we are ¨married¨here after all to avoid confusion or unwanted offers...

much love to all,
Kendra

quick hi from Quito

2006-08-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Ah the rain... just when we´ve got our provisional dam build we get two days of rain and the river grows a meter... crazy stuff. But that´s the way of the rainforest. A week of sun and it´ll be dry again and we´ll be on our way.

We continue to be happy, healthy, and working hard. So much to share and no time, but i´ll try to get something better out next week.

Love to all,

Kendra

weekly update plus

2006-08-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

It is so hard to sit down and sumarize what we have done and learned each week... it is so much more than fits in these words and my time in front of the computer...

Last sunday we had an extended and extremely fruitful meeting with the community water board in which we planned to work every sunday to set weekly goals and work plans, and then have a meeting with the entire community every monday. We also went through the mothly costs of running their water system in order to revise their budget and the monthly tarriff that the families will have to pay for water. It came out to about 4 dollars a month per family, which they at first said was way too much, that families wouldn´t pay that. We talked around it from other directions, how if just once in that month you have to take your kid to a doctor in puyo because he drank contaminated water it costs more than 5 dollars, how much would you pay for 500 liters of pure and clean water, etc, and they (the water board) realized that it was actually within reason, and prepared themselves to present the budget to the community the next day. We also taught the water board members how to serve as facilitators for the activities we had planned for the meeting the next day.

Monday meeting: many fewer families came this time than last time, which was a disappointment. Even the president of the community didn´t show... we had great sucess with our two group activities and a game at the end (they were remarkable in how much they had absorbed the material and knew the answers), but ran into problems with the more administrative decisions we wanted to make--form work groups to work on the dam project, select candidates for operator, and see what the community thought about the budget etc--because we didn´t have a majority of the families.

Tuesday: it rained like crazy... we were all ready with a good group of people to divide into two group`s, one working on the extension of the distribucion line out to the farthest houses (not part of our work, but part of the community´s responsibilty to the contractor to help in the construction) and the other group to fix up the temporary dam and start excavating the foundation if it was dry enough. INstead we spent the day on the technical manual, and also Froy went into town to get the ball rolling on the production of a booklet we want to produce with excerpts from where there is no doctor.

Wednesday: it continued raining, but lighter, so we went up to the river with a group of people from the community and discovered that the river had risen about a meter, maybe 10 times the flow of water from the day before... it is the rainforest after all, these rivers grown and shrink an incredible amount on a daily and weekly basis. Our temporary dam actually held admirably well, except one hole due to the force of the water. We created an addition to the dam, and cleared out a good path for the water to drain out from where we are going to construct once the sun starts to shine and the water level drops. In the afternoon we sat down with a few key members of the comunity, including the president, who told us that the community had decided back 3 years ago that the community couldn´t afford to pay an operator and that the operation of the system was to be done by the community water board.

pizza in Santa Ana

2006-07-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Were moving right along in our new objectives, with a newly elected water board in the community. The secretary Melida told us in our first meeting how sorry they all felt that they hadn´t gotten together the new water board sooner to take more advantage of our time in the community, and how happy she was that we kept after things and kept talking to people, working with kids in school, etc. She became interested because her oldest son came home and was telling her about our bacteria results and that the water from the source they drink is contaminated and they needed to boil it. Her comments just about made the trip for me... whatever happens we are doing some good.

The community is in the midst of the 3 day party to celebrat their 44th anniversary (3 days of chicha, dancing, drumming, and food). We´re now in the process of working with the contractor and the municipalitý´s social liason to hammer out a manual of administration and all the associated forms, and a manual of operation and maintenance of their system. Definitely interesting and challenging. Right after the party we´re going to round up the community and start the physical construction in the dam, and train the important people in how to manage their respective tasks (and of teach the working sof everything, technical and social, the 6 member water board and a few other interested community members to have a good body of people who really understand their system). A couple of days ago we had another community meeting to talk about the related issues of health and higiene that complement a potable water system to improve the health of the community. Only this time, with the help of another volunteer in thec ommunity, we had a very well planned meeting with activities, cards, etc, and incentives. We visited every house to give a personal invitation the day before, and almost every family came : )

I just love, love, the community and the atmosphere - imagine a community of handmade wooden houses, some with corrugated metal roofs and some with palm frond roofs, gathered around a large plaza/ soccer field, overlooking a broad and rocky river, with layers of hilly rainforest fading back to mountains and clouds. Its breathtaking. And the atmosphere... . Its a different attitude of work and organization... much more ¨traquilidad¨ and waiting to see what happens, which is hard for my american demand for solutions, plans, timetables and results, but also really relaxing once you get into it. The trick is to rally the organization and drive that they definitely do have, and work in their terms.

Lots of fun stories to share, but I´ll close with one. Our family asked us a couple of times if we knew how to cook pizza. We said sure, but who knows how it will turn out when the only source of heat to cook with is a fire. (Think about it most american kitches have have an oven, 4 burners on the stove, a toaster, and a microwave... thats 7 places to heat things up). Actually, it turned out rather delicious... We made some dough with water, salt, and flour (they don´t really use yeast around here), rolled it out with a nalgene bottle, and then fried it on the lid of a pot with some vegetable oil. We flipped it over, and on the toasted side put precooked sauce complete with tomatoes, meat, and vegetables, and then some shredded mozerella cheese (the flavor is something else here, i´m not a huge fan, but at least its cheese for my wisconsin blood). Back on the fire it went, covered with another lid of a pot, and once the cheese melted, off again. And wonder of all wonders, it tasted delicious--not all that far off from real pizza--and our family loved it.

Ciao for now,

Kendra

quick hello

2006-07-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

I´ve got to be super quick... too much to do in our day in town : )

Froy and I have had many adventures since the last update, most with beaurocracy, communication, and organisation of development projects like this water project. We have pretty much uncovered the past and present of the situation, and putting together a new plan for the future. In short, the water project (though the world bank, a quito office, a municipal office, and a contractor) DOES include a slow sand filter already. No one in the community knew because the communication and involvement is so bad. The project is rather delayed so they are all cutting corners, and they have neither the money nor the time to do the community education component of the project (absolutely essential so that someone will clean the catchment, adjust the valves, run the pump, etc) nor are they going to fix the dam in the river that is in the process of breaking. Our new plan is to do these two things... the community capacitating to ensure that there is a large body of people in the community who understand how the whole water system works, how to run it, and how to fix problems, and also work with them to do some cement construction up in the river to improve the dam and catchment.

Other adventures abound--bathing in any of the plethera of rivers of different sizes in the community, learning some of the traditional ceramics, stories of cousins eaten by anocondas and relatives crippled for life by a boa and an insect whose venom is so poisonous that you will die within the hour ... and the only folk remedy is that you have to make love with someone... if you look at the snapfish photo album I sent out in another e-mail, its the yellowish insect floating around in a plastic bottle... Esteban, the man we are living with, grabbed it off a light and preserved it in paint thinner.

overall, life is beautiful and froy and i are really happy, and learning more every day.

love,

kendra

6 days into the summer in Santa Ana

2006-07-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Just a quick hello from Ecuador. Aside from a cold that Í´m recovering from and a sore back from hauling and sifting sand, I am extremely content -- I love the style and pace of life here. After rising with the sun with the morning, eating some tea and a breakfast of rice and bananas, or fried potatoes and eggs, with the family, working until the mid afternoon when we eat our major meal around 3 or 4 pm, and then working some more, bathing and washing clothes in the river, chatting with the grandpas and playing with the kids, we are so ready to sleep after the evening tea and snack at around 8:30pm.. a little different from MIT, but really nice.

going to the riverAs today is saturday, it was six days ago since we arrived in Santa Ana, and a lot has happened. Santa Ana is a gorgeous, friendly, fascinating community and people have been extremely welcoming and interested in our project. We are staying with a family that lives right on the main town center field with soccer goals, a volleyball net, and a communual meeting place. This is extremely convenient because we easily run into a lot of different people - kids going to and from school, grandmas and grandpas sitting around in the shade with grandchildren, women carrying vegetables in from their community garden, men learning to carve birds out of balsa wood from the resident artist, etc. Some of the most rewarding time has been spent just sitting and talking with these people, about their life, their culture, and of course, water. Froy is especially equipped for this sort of informal support-building, as people are always eager to hear about food, life, family in Mexico, only one or two steps removed from their lives in Santa Ana, as opposed to life at MIT which is an easy ten steps removed...

I mentioned in my last e-mail that we did some bacteria testing of the water... we have found that more than the information it gave us, these little filter papers make an amazingly valuable visual aid for conversations with people about their water. They are all really interested in knowing how safe their water is, and know that some of their diseases come from unsafe water. Everyone knows that the Pastaza is contaminated and although they bathe and wash clothes in the river noone has ever admitted to drinking the water straight from the river. What was surprising to us, was that the community sources of water which appeared to us as well to be clear, clean water, were actually far more contaminated than the Pastaza. In retrospect this makes a lot of sense given all the human and animal activity, latrines, chicken coops etc, and that the water must run very shallow beneath the earth to surface so frequently as it does. The level of contamination in the school rainwater system was also surprising, and one of the topics in our upcoming community meeting will be what to do about that system-- clean, well maintained rain water systems are generally relatively safe, but never free of contamination. Options include a throrough cleaning and inspection of the system to try to improve it, sending kids to school with boiled water in bottles, boiling the water at the school, etc.

The river Santander is percieved to be very clean, and it is, relative to the pastaza, but our results mean that it is essential that this water is treated before distribution and consumption, especially by children. Its rather amazing to sit around in the evening with whoever happens to be hanging around the balsa wood carving shop, or drinking tea in someone´s kitchen, and show them their different sources of water. We always save the boiled water for last - two examples of filter papers stained blue with bacteria food and some sooty marks of tweezers, but not even a single point of red or blue bacteria. The women suck in air and show it to their mother or friend sitting next to them. Doing the testing, we were actually berating ourselves a bit that we didn´t have sterile water as required to do a control at the beginning and end of the processing, and we used water from my water bottle instead (that had been boiled that morning) as the best we had -- actually it has turned out to be the best teaching tool we have. Its rather powerful for them to see the bacteria from their own water options, and then see the difference that boiling the water makes.

After a couple of days of sorting and sifting sand and gravel we have now constructed our prototype slow sand filter which is sitting in the town meeting place, and one of our daily duties is to feed it more rain water or source water. Maturation of the filter should take about a week or so, after which point we will test water before and after to see how the filter is doing.

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 9 am we have organized a community wide Agua Junta - water meeting, sending out invitations through children in school, and we will also be announcing it once again today when we return from Puyo because all the women will be gathered to make Chicha - the local alcoholic beverage made from yucca root - cooked and then chewed by the women of the community to add the bacteria to ferment the yucca... Add water, and you´ve got the milky, chuncky, slightly sweet beverage with a wide range of alcoholic content depending on its age. One of these times we´d like to snag a sample, to test if the alcohol content is enough to kill all the bacteria in the water they use to make it...

Last night we met with one of the presidents of the community, an amazing leader and craftswoman, to get her suggestions on our activities and agenda for the agua junta. We will have open meetings like this every sunday, both to continue the discussion of water safety and hygiene habits for good heath, as well as plan the next week of construction on the filter.

Until next saturday. Much love to you all and hope you all are having a wonderful summer,

Kendra

First hello from Santa Ana

2006-06-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Although I do not have too much time, I wanted to write to you with an update from Ecuador.

In a word, things have been rather amazing so far. Its so amazing to be traveling, but also working on something extremely meaningful. Corinne Duhalde, an anthropologies, the project coordinator for Ecuador Volunteer´s program in Santa Ana, is amazing. We got to spend two nights at her house in Quito...gleaning so much valuable information and perspective on the community, its formal and informal leaders, the four different indigenous nationalities who live together in Santa Ana, and a lot of the greater context of indigenous organizations, etc, and also just staying up late into the night talking about culture, politics, ´¨development¨ and what it means for countries like ecuador and indigenous communities.

We then took a bus to Puyo from Quito... a very active bus ride with people constantly getting on and off.. once a pair of men got on and the first one started with ¨¨I have the secret to all your problem...a cure for cancer, a love potion for you to find your true love, an elixer for you to have children--or not to have children¨¨ he went on like that, all the while making this elaborate tree with newspaper. He passed out his magic chocolates, and by the end of the half an hour everyone on the bus (us included) thought he was the funniest comedian ever and bought a few of his chocolates...it was pretty crazy.

Santa Ana is an absolutely gorgeous little community, the main center is built up high over the big and powerful pastaza river, a tributary of the amazon. Houses are semi open to the outside because the climate is so beautiful -- 70s and 80s during the day and 50s and 60s at night -- and nowhere near as humid as I anticipated. There is an artist named chibolo who sits on the main square under a little shelter and carves birds out of balsa wood. When the clouds clear you can see this huge volcano Sangai protruding high into the distant sky. At night the stars are absolutely unbelievable-- some of the classic northern constellations but also new ones, since we are on the equator. The children are so beautiful, tender, and alive in their work and play.

We are staying with a family of five -- the husband Esteban is one of the main organizers behind the water system in Santa Ana, and his wife Latisia is equally active and concerned about clean water, especialy for her two one-year-old twins Samira and Shirle (and her six-year old sacha). We went on a tour yesterday of the water system, and took samples from all the various places where people get water. We processed them yesterday (basically filtering all the water through a filter paper so the bacteria is caught there, and now we are letting the bacteria grow overnight. This afternoon we should have a much better idea of the state of contamination of the different water sources. The river that they have chosen to pipe water in from, the Santandelo, is much, much cleaner than the pastaza ( 0.96 NTU insead of 14.6 which is the turbidity reading of the pastaza), of course this says nothing about its potability, that we will know this afternoon.

Much love to you all. I will write again in another week or so, though it might be a bit more.

-Kendra

hi from Puyo

2006-06-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

My apologies that this update is going to be rather short... Our bus to santa ana leaves in 30 minutes and we have a couple purchases to make as well.

Briefly, we have done a lot of planning and discussing with Corinne and she is an amazing person, and has really helped us work on how to apply our ideas to THIS community. We have bought a sample quantity of HTH chlorine powder and found out prices for buying it in bulk in Quito. Today we made a really nice chart-plan that I will send to you all when I have a bit more time. We now in Puyo and will take the bus to Santa Ana today. Tomorrow there is the weekly meeting with the president, etc of the community, which we will attend and present ourselves, and plan for a separate weekly meeting time for us to dialog with the community about their water system, learn from them, teach about hygiene, and plan how to implement the slow sand filter, etc. We are also planning on working with kids through the school. There already exists a water comittee in Santa Ana, and Esteban, one of its members is aparently extremely capable, intelligent, and an effective leader. We will hopefully meet him today and he can give us lots of direction on how to proceed.

We´ll be in touch again when we come back to Puyo, about one week from now.

Regards,

Kendra

off to Ecuador

2006-06-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Please let me know if you don't want to receive updates like this from me...

For those of you who don't know, I leave for Ecuador tomorrow for a 10
week trip. I'm going to be living in the tiny community of Santa Ana,
in the Amazonian region, and working with the people there (along with
one other student, Froy, from MIT) on a water treatment system. We
have an advisor here at MIT who has been helping us learn how to build
a slow sand filter - a pretty amazing, simple system that uses sand
and gravel to filter water, removing organic matter, turbidity, and if
it is operated correctly up to 99.99% of bacteria, etc. That is the
ultimate dream goal... we've got a lot in the way of community
immersion, understanding, and work to go before we can decide that
that is the right solution and that we have the means to do it.

I'm so excited about this trip...about living for 10 weeks in a
community of 60 families in the Amazon Rainforest, about putting some
basic science (water testing) to use in a meaningful way, about the
challenge of a real engineering project that if everything comes
together could make a real difference in people's lives, and probably
most of all about all that I will learn about people, culture, the
rainforest, water, science, engineering and myself.

As always, I love to hear from you all so send me an e-mail if you get
a chance : ) I'll probably have internet access about once a week, and
I'll be sending out updates like this one every week or two.

in peace,
Kendra

Term is ending

2005-12-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

It's been a while; I never seem to get around to writing no matter how often I remind myself I should. Tonight, however, I have a term paper to procrastinate and therefore the perfect excuse!

I would definitely say that life is accelerating in all its facets: I seem to be spending more time on everything and less time on nothing... classes, research, friends, my radio show... and there is this crunch-time vibe rippling through campus as each of us realize that we'll be home for break in two weeks--and all the work we have to do before then :)

Some exciting tidbits to share....

Apparently the guys downstairs have a deal with some people who dispose of dry ice because it keeps showing up in various creative and sometime explosive experiments around here. The coolest part is that the young woman in the foreground of the picture, Jen (a junior on my floor), as she was playing with the vapor pouring out over the sides of the container, commented: "fluid mechanics are so cool. I used to understand them better: It's all about the Navier-Stokes equations that completely describe the motion--they just aren't solvable." It's mind-boggling to think about all the things people here know that I will never, ever know or understand.

I found out that I got into the 4 week class to become certified as an EMT - emergency medical technician - the first responders that arrive in an ambulance. That's what I'll be doing this january, and after that I'll be able to volunteer at the student-run MIT ambulance. It's going to be intense, but I'm really excited at this chance to learn how to give real patient care, and see whether medicine is the life for me.

I'm getting more involved with our radio show "Spherio: The Local Voice of Our Hemisphere" and actually co-hosted one of our recent shows on AIDS. It was not a little bit nerve racking, but awesome at the same time.

Perhaps the biggest life development is that I have mastered the art of procrastination. Up until college I did pretty well with the idea of putting aside schoolwork in favor of anything that was really worthwhile... the problem is that, here, in any given evening there are probably at least three things that meet that definition. There are so many events I'd rather go to, people I'd rather talk to, and ideas I'd rather explore than sit down and do my homework :) But such is life, and it is the best kind of problem to have.

That's all the news I can think of around here -- I try to pull out highlights but really, everything runs together into a mishmosh and what once seemed extraordinary becomes a mundane routine. I do my best to keep it fresh, and for the most part it seems to be working!

Hope you all are enjoying the beginning of winter. I'd love to hear what is going on with you, so please write if you get the urge.

sailboats and problem sets

2005-09-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

An update on life at MIT: term has started, ushering with it a new
set of lingo.... "tooling" is doing school work "problem sets" are
the only kind of homework we get here-they consist of some amount of
challenging problems and take a few hours to complete. Even my
sailing class called our assignment to learn to tie a few knots a
"problem set". "Punting" is when you blow off your work to do
something fun... like my newfound diversion of watching episodes of
Firefly on DVD :) There isn't much in the way of free time around
here, and I've got an interview tomorrow for a research position that
I hope will be my paying job for this semester.

I continue to really like my door, my room, my roommate, etc. I also
like the way things just seem to *work* around here. It's the little
things, like having a swimsuit dryer in the locker room at the pool
so you don't have to carry around a wet suit all day, that make all
the difference. MIT seems to have thought of (and paid for)
everything and more. I just started my sailing class (it is my gym
class for this term) and I'm so excited to learn to sail on the
Charles River. It is so beautiful. Boston is great, but the tall
buildings and complete concrete coverage makes me miss the open
greenspace back home - cows, cornfeilds, rolling farmland - it's all
so beautiful and freeing.

The hardest thing for me to get used to is the overwhelming political
apathy around campus. I'm used to life in Madison, and especially
with my circles of friends, where people talk about politics, social
problems, world events, questions, and solutions all the time. I
never realized how much until I got here and the silence is stifling.
There is a sense that "We're at MIT. The real world doesn't apply
here. It doesn't affect me." A lot of people wished they were more
involved, but are convinced they are too busy. This saddens me most
of all because these are the people who have an incredible capacity
to make the future of the world, and yet there seems to be little
concern about what the best way to go about it is. There are some
very wonderful, inspiring exceptions to all this (Noam Chomsky is a
professor here, for example) and some awesome student groups that do
great work. I'm working on finding my place amongst them all and
surrounding myself with people who will continue to reinforce and
challenge my beliefs about the world and the future.

Yikes that was a bit of a tirade. Sorry about that :) Life is good,
the weather's gorgeous, and there is a very pleasant chocolate smell
wafting in my window...

To all you ysp-ers on this list---I've got my wallpaper on my
computer set to cycle through the Henry IV pictures, so I think of
you all the time :) . I hear Othello has 60+ kids in it! That is
amazing. Othello is one of my favorite plays, I'm so excited for
everyone who is in it.

Love to you all,
Kendra

P.S. I'd love to hear from you all about what you are up to or a
simple tale from good old life in Madison.

greetings from MIT

2005-09-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

Some of you are friends and family that I talk to regularly and others of you I haven't seen in a long time. Just wanted to send out a quick hello from the fair city of Cambridge Massachusetts and the MIT campus.

MIT is truly like no other place on earth. The first 48 hours or so were rather overwhelming and intimidating, but I'm past that now, making friends, and finding my way to fit into this world of endless opportunity and possibility. I was assigned to a dorm called "East Campus" temporarily for the first few days of registration, which was a great place - classic dorm style halls except that they allowed mural painting on the walls, and literally everywhere was painted - halls, rooms, and bathrooms. The bathroom nearest my room was painted black with lots of fluorescent colored paint and lit entirely by black lights. The dorm was known for it's crazy constructions... some guys on one of the floors last year built a computer controlled disco floor with over 500 squares with LED lights for nearly infinite possibility for color combinations which they then programmed to do all kinds of gorgeous moving color patterns. And they did it in about a week.

East Campus was a great place, but almost on a whim I decided to ask for a different dorm called "Random Hall" in the readjustment lottery, so here I am, in a gorgeous double coming straight off a spacious kitchen in the only dorm (at MIT and likely in the world) where you can check whether or not the bathrooms, washers, and dryers are in use or not via the internet in your room. A wonderful result of MIT's policy of enabling you to live exactly where you want to live is that there really is a unique culture and personality to each of the dorms--mine is a little towards the geeky side of the MIT spectrum (who else would decide to wire bathroom doors to the internet in their free time??), but extremely friendly, close, and does a lot of cooking. http://web.mit.edu/random-hall/www/

I am amassing quite a collection of "only at MIT" sights/experiences: eating ice-cream that upperclassmen had just frozen using jets of liquid nitrogen, wandering through the 'activities fair' and seeing someone's random electrical project featuring a mess circuits and forks allowing a row of dill pickles to sizzle and sparkle on and off (it was counting to 256 in binary numbers), hearing a girl in my seminar tell about the business she started in Nigeria, and the ubiquitous number jargon that peppers daily converstion: it's not "I'm not a biology major, " but "I'm course 7", not "I'm taking multivariable calculus," but, "i'm taking 18.02," not "Meet you at the main lecture hall in Green Building," but "Meet you at 54-100."

In the past few days I have been increasingly impressed by not just the brains and quirkiness of MIT students, but how engaged and interested they are about more serious issues. I've had some great discussions about religion, race, prejudice, politics, globalization and all sorts of other topics. There are a great many international students here with fascinating perspectives on their own culture and life in America.

The plan for the fall right now is to take chemistry, genetics, physics, and a class on race/gender, plus my advising seminar "AIDS in the 21st" century. Classes start this coming wednesday, and I am very excited. I'm intending to major in biology.

Back from the land where everyone is named Lepcha

2005-05-07T03:31:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

We're back in Darjeeling, the original city where we did our homestays and had our first real chance to adapt to life in this part of the world. Being back here is surreal--a slam in the face to confirm how rapidly this journey will come to a close. As much as I have thrived on each new day and the experiences each brought with it, I am also feeling content to return to the language, food, bed, and family I've grown up with. I'm eager to apply some of the attitudes and ideas I've learned here to life back in the states.

Our rural home stays these past few days were absolutely amazing... We backpacked about 45 minutes down to the village with all our gear, then dispersed to families all over the small village of Pekang, in West Bengal, India. My family lived about a 20 minute walk uphill from the main house we used as a group center during our five days there. I've always been directionally challenged, and it really came into play out as I tried to find my way to and from the main house, my home, friends' houses, the elementary school, etcetera on the paths—a winding web of narrow dirt trails worn by years of feet trodding up, down, and around. Though my poor directional sense guaranteed that I'd get lost at least once on any journey, this led me into a lot more encounters with random villagers who would give a fond smile and point me in the right direction.

Pekang is situated in the last dribbling foothills of the Himalayas, which translates to my experience as "extremely steep hillside". It is very much an Agrarian community, with simple dwellings claiming anywhere that it is reasonably flat and terraces occupying the rest of the land. The vast majority of people here are of Lepcha ethnicity, so literally everone's last name is Lepcha, making role-call at the elementary school rather amusing.

My family was absolutely wonderful - so warm and loving and so eager to share with me their way of live. My ama, at 27 years-old, has one 10 year-old son Yuel and an extremely hardworking husband. Our abode consisted of: a 3-room house, a separate cement/mud kichen room, a wooden outhouse-style toilet, an outside cement washing area with a tap, 2 oxen, 1 cow, 2 dogs, 2 hens, a beautiful garden with flowers, banana trees, and vegetables, plus a number of terraced feilds on which we grew rice, millet, and corn.

Though I wasn't there during the peak planting or harvesting season, I was still taken aback by the extent of daily labor in the village. It hit me hardest when I spent some time with another home stay family: watching the absolutely gorgeous the 30-year old mother dressed in worn clothing haul huge baskets of firewood, batter rice with a giant mortar-and-pestle to unsheathe the grains, and look after her children: three-year-old Lagan and five-year old Agan, I was struck by how cheerfully she carried her load but how strongly the exhaustion came through in her eyes.

Basic household tasks and maintenance require so much more work here than we are used to. Take cooking dinner as an example. Rice, the staple grain, is grown on terraces here and then stored in its husks. To un-husk it, you have to use a giant log-and-stump mortar-and-pestle for about 10 minutes, shake the husks off using a flat bamboo basket-tray, and then repeat the process again to completely remove the husks. The heat source for cooking is a gorgeous earthen stove with a space for a small fire beneath two holes with built-in props for pots—forming an earthen, wood burning, two-burner stove. Of course, the fuel must be hauled from the forest, split, and the fire tended as it burns… Now you have the raw materials, and finally the cooking process as we know it can begin.

That's the other thing I realized in my time in Pekang—as you move along the scale towards a more simple, agrarian life-style, conveniences may go by the wayside and daily living may become more labor-intensive, but the fundamentals remain the same. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, family, love, education, sleeping—all of the things that truly matter and really define human life remain remarkably the same. I got lost on the footpaths just as I lose my way on the streets of Madison; kids go to school and do their homework; parents work to provide the best they can for their children. In coming to a "rural village," the preconceptions we are taught are inescapable ingrained in our minds—we think village life is hard, the people are poor, and few opportunities exist to move out or up. Yet we also idealize the serenity of the village, expecting to fall in love with the romance and simplicity of country life. These two extremes are balanced by the reality we experienced: the work is hard, the air is clean and quiet, communities are tighter, and people do not have the same opportunities we do.

I was slightly sick for a few days of our stay—good old traveler's diarrhea come back again as my system struggled to adapt to new food. This made toilets an experience I treated with a lot of care—keeping an eye out of the scorpions, oversize spiders, moths, snakes, and leeches that have all been spotted in the area; trying not to think about exactly what might come out of me; and plotting what it'll require to wash everything down. When toilets consist of a wooden outhouse equipped with a stone hole leading down to a pipe—and, if you are lucky, a bucket of water to help wash things down—things sometimes get a little hairy. I definitely had some experiences I won't forget for a while. Long ago in an early e-mail I promised a toilet description, so there you go—I think you get the idea.

My last evening with my home stay family was an extremely wonderful, warm, memorable one. I was instructed in the finer points of momo-making (momos being small cabbage dumplings that are absolutely delicious and serve as the fast food for pretty much everywhere we've been on this trip). We had a blast as I learned to fold and crease the dough, my brother Yuel cheering me on as I finally caught on to the method of keeping them together. As we waited for them to steam over the fire, we talked about food in America and they were surprised to learn that corn, cabbage, spinach, potatoes, etc were all available in America too. From there, we somehow dissolved into body games; I pulled out the American classics: we curled our tongues, patted our heads while rubbing our tummies, tried to touch our noses with our tongues—and they taught me some new ones—we struggled to lift up the appointed finger with our hands all mixed up, failed to snap our wrists like my baba, and marveled at Yuel's double-jointed thumbs. My ama and baba, though the've been married for 11 years now, still have an amazing youthful exuberance about them and we entertained ourselves with giddy laughter for hours until the momo's were done to perfection and we all enjoyed the warm and tasty treat. We exchanged photographs and addresses (the photo of Yuel was 7 years out of date, but so sweet of them to give to me!), and I went to bed that night brimming with warmth and happiness.

Hurrah! The internet just started to work!! (This e-mail is so long because it took that long for my e-mail program to load, and now it's working fast as can be. Who can ever tell about the internet here).

This is probably my last e-mail before I'm back in America in person. It is unbelievable how fast this trip has gone, and equally unbelievable to look back and think about all the crazy, heartwarming, terrifying, and absurd things I have done and learned.

Love to you all,
Kendra

An anigompa sleepover and gulab jamun

2005-04-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

Hello all, just a quick update of where I am and what I'm up to. I'm writing from Kalimpong, India, a medium-sized city and our springboard to begin our rural homestays for tomorrow -- we'll be staying with farming families for about 6 days, and they won't speak any English so we're in for a challenge. We've spent the last few days seeing a few sights and driving through Sikkim--staying in smallish towns, enjoying the lush greenery and avoiding the frequent rains of the monsoon season that appears to have begun a bit early this year.

Outside of Gangtok, us girls had the chance to spend the night at an anigompa or nunnery. We had quite the adventure, including a gang of yappy dogs, a 3:45 a.m. awakening for a 4:00 puja in which we determinedly held our eyes open while a dozen nuns chanted in Tibetan for 2 hours, a broken bench (that I had slept on the night before), which we nailed back together by using our nalgene bottles as hammers, and a bunch of really sweet, amazing nuns who guided us through it all.

I'd like to get out of the glare of this computer screen and back onto the streets, so I'll just share with you all the 'yak-yak' I wrote about the Indian sweet that has taken all of us (myself most definately included) by storm:

Known to the fans in our midst as 'brown balls', to exasperated group leaders as 'indian crack', and to our taste buds as the doughnuts of the himalaya, gulab jamun have become a fetish, addiction, and dare I say preoccupation of 90% of our group.

Picture a sweet ball of doughnut dough -- now deep-fry it, then soak it in sugar syrup until it is saturated and dripping, and keep it in a heated tray in your street shop until the consumer comes to eagerly devour them as the sugar drips from her hands and down her chins. Sometimes they melt in our mouths with warmth, other times we discover a hard, doughnutty interior, sometimes the sugar syrup drips all over the place, other times they develop a delicious crust from sitting in the tray too long -- any way they come they please the taste buds and warm the heart.

We have all developed eyes for the small sweet shops that stock our favorite spherical delicacies -- when we come into a new town in our jeeps we scout out the best places and frown in disappointment if no-one makes the beautiful delicacy that is gulab jamun. Other indian sweets -- julabi, bright orange pretzel-shaped deep fried corn syrup; sweet white patties in custard; fudge-like sugar cake -- they please some among us, but nothing can bring a delighted smile from the whole group like a bag of gulab jamun on a humid Sikkim afternoon.

Love you, and I'll be home to see you all before you know it!
Kendra

H.H., monks, and the blind - a message from Kathmandu

2005-04-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

We're back in Kathmandu for a one-day layover, before tomorrow's day long journey by plane and jeep to Gangtok, India.

I just want to relate an experience in our last day in Lhasa when we went for a quick tour of a school for blind students. Only started 7 years ago, the school now has over 40 students and dozens of graduates who are now working and thriving on their own. The students stay at the school except for a 2-3 month winter vacation, and learn Chinese, Tibetan, and English, plus the corresponding braille for all three languages. The woman who showed us around was one of the first students, and she related how difficult it in her village because she was practically homebound because of her blindness, until she came to school and learned skills her sighted neighbors had never had the opportunity to learn. She now has started a massage clinic and has eight employees. The students get to decide what they want to do after they get the fundamentals down -- learn massage, go to school with sighted children, or go home and set up a small business, like two brothers who recently open a tea shop. Playing with these kids was absolutely amazing -- they have such confidence, poise, ability, and better english than anyone else we had met in Lhasa. One boy, about 10, sung us a practically un-accented version of that song 'you and me, me and you, so happy together'. We were all extremely touched of the beauty of the moment as he belted out the melody, his whitened eyes rolling and his entire heart poured into the endeavor. The sucess of these children and this school impressed upon us all what is possible if you just put your dreams into action -- one of the founders, a blind woman from Germany, discovered there was no Tibeatan braille, so she invented it; no blind school in Tibet, so she made one!

The day after tomorrow, in Gangtok, we may have a chance to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak. I would be thrilled if this possibility actually materializes, as I have been reading a few of his works and he is an incredibly inspiring man, both for his compassion and humor as a human being and for his iron-fast resolution to a peaceful path as a leader in exile. While we were in Tibet, his absence seemed to have a presence larger than anyone who was there in the flesh -- his picture is banned throughout, and his name is spoken only with caution. The throne (a simple raised platform on which one sits crosslegged, as all 'thrones' are in Buddhist tradition) he should be occupying in the Potala Palace in Lhasa is filled by an empty robe, delicately arranged into a triangle shape that gives just enough of a sense of a human form to make H.H.'s absence all the more of a presence. Carrying pictures of H.H. into Tibet is officially banned, and the Chinese customs officials are becoming even harsher about enforcing this. Nevertheless, Tibetans would occaisionally ask us for these pictures, which are impossible to find within Tibet. A few people in our group had accidently brought pictures in, and they described how those poeple they bestowed them upon would put them to their foreheads and simply cry.

Aside from the emotional allure of H.H., his books and interviews convey the depth of his wisdom and the thing that, for me, separates Buddhism from other faiths. The Dalai Lama holds to the idea that if science can disprove any of the beliefs of Buddhism, then they will revise that belief to accord with science; Sakyamuni Buddha himself told his deciples not to accept any of his teachings on faith, but rather to test them against their own experience. H.H. has much to say about everything from human compassion to global politics, and I would love to have the chance to meet him in person.

After a few days in Gangtok, we will be moving out into rural Sikkim to stay briefly (7 days or so) with host families and get to experience the reality of rural farm life. **A side note, a monk in his gold and maroon robes just sat down next to me at the internet cafe and is computing away.... such is the joy of this part of the world** Depending on how things go in Gangtok, it may be another week or two before I will e-mail again. By that time, I will be heading into the last week of the trip.

I cannot believe how fast time has gone, yet at the same time I also cannot believe all that I have seen and experienced, and what I have come to take as normal - monks walking down the street, disabled men and women begging on the street, disgusting trough-style toilets, living out of a backpack, crossing the road frogger-style because there are no traffic lights, and having to bargain down the price for everything from taxis to a pair of jeans. I have come to understand the reasoning and efficieny behind some of these things that at first seemed so foreign and counter-intuitive. Perhaps the deepest thing I have learned is something we've all, myself included, been taught on an intellectual level - as human beings we are all one and the same wherever you go and whatever you do - but I think I've finally internalized it, come to fully understand that we all have the same desire to find happiness. Even without a common language, culture, or background it is always possible to communicate this common humanity: with a smile, a laugh, or a touch of the hand.

Love to you all, Kendra