Birthday! --From the field to Dhaka

Thanks for your messages--wish I could be celebrating with you all! I had a great dinner party, though, on this side of the world, with a group of about ten good friends who have been so essential to my experience here. We had it at Kozmo, this hip little lounge/restaurant in Banani, Dhaka. Afterward, Piya, her boyfriend, and her brother played guitar and sang for all of us...we ended on California Dreamin'. It was a fantastic night.

I got back to Dhaka the night before, a five-hour bus ride in a non-airconditioned bus with 100 degree weather outside. SHOWERED, then went straight to two other birthdays (May is the time!), one on the rooftop of the American Club, where most of the American circle was, and some Bangladeshis who I knew or knew of. Another California girl and I westsided it out to 2Pac, good times.

As far as the fieldwork-- we discovered, after three weeks of trials and a long phone conference with a chlorination expert at the CDC, that directly chlorinating dugwells with daily low-dose chlorination does not work. Because there's a lot of organic matter in the water give it's a hand-dug well with cracks to the soil, and there is a constant influx and outflow of water, the chlorine a) attaches immediately to the organic matter on the lining of the well without disinfecting the water and b) becomes very diluted with the influx of water.

So that means we have to change our entire approach. The trial protocol I've worked on for about two months is out the window, and we move on to alternative solutions. It's too bad, but such is science! The water quality tests, though, and the meticulous record-keeping we have taught the field staff will not be in vain. I hope. We've been put in contact with this Harvard-Berkeley-Google (what a fantastic combination!) team that makes stands where you pour in the water, and it automatically calculates and adds drops of chlorine, and the water comes out a spout fully chlorinated and disinfected. We're also looking into chlorinating the overhead storage tanks, but as the World Bank visitors pointed out, if you're going to be calculating DALYs based on diarrheal disease from contaminated water, and long-term health risk from arsenic poisoning, you will have to factor in risk of falling and injury or death from climbing up to a tank 25 feet above ground. These are all tangles we must comb through in the next two and a half weeks before I leave.

The World Bank visit was eye-opening. The people who visited are consultants to the World Bank--they will write the policy proposal for ALL water and sanitation in Bangladesh, on a governmental, non-governmental, and private sector level. This is called the Water and Sanitation Program. They came to our project to learn if dugwells really do have fecal coliform counts in the thousands, as another study suggests. The standard for fecal coliform count is zero by WHO, and 10 by Bangladeshi government... we were able to show them that chlorination works in killing bacteria, but we are still working to figure out a way to implement that successfully. In the past, monthly high-dose chlorination at a quarter of the EPA shock chlorination standard has worked in keeping down bacteria for a few days, but by week two the coliform count starts to double every day, which is very dangerous especially during the monsoon season when there are a million contaminants in the environment and people are more prone to falling ill. I hope they come away with the impression that dugwells, and especially large Indara wells, CAN be an effective arsenic mitigation solution, more research needs to be done on how to chlorinate them effectively.

When working in the field, it's easy to get in a bubble and it's easy to feel alone. Interacting with people who you can have those more big picture policy or science-based discussions with, though, is absolutely invaluable. Seeing the big picture and sharing our findings have renewed my drive. It was a great week in Pabna.

Last note: I taught Mahi (the two year old little boy in the family I was staying with) to say O-ba-ma!