Eight to five

Well, those weren’t the exact hours and yes, I was well frustrated at first that I didn’t have enough work. As time went on though, I took more control of the project and guided it in the direction I thought best. And I appreciated the luxury of early mornings for the gym, of late drinks at the Nordic Club on a Wednesday night during finals period.

I came with the goals of 1) systemizing the process of data collection and management and 2) implementing a new daily low-dose chlorination protocol. I spent a good amount of time in the office and the field collecting existing data and trying to analyze it (“Impossible!” a statistician finally told me), then understanding the existing protocol of chlorination and testing. Not easy when you don’t speak the same language, and field staff are eager to tell you what you want to hear, not the truth. The old protocol was to chlorinate every month at very high levels that made the water taste terrible: not to mention the chlorine ceased to be active after 24 hours, and not surprisingly fecal coliform counts skyrocketed after two weeks. So kudos to us for having arsenic-free wells, but contaminated wells that could cause diarrhea, dysentery or worse, typhoid fever or cholera, were no better.

So, I created based on Dr. Wilson’s draft a new chlorination process that involves adding small amounts of household bleach to the wells every day. This new protocol came with a chain of command that effectively got information from the field, to Dhaka, to neat Excel files following templates I created, to Dr. Wilson at Harvard. I consulted with experts in the States, Dhaka, and a project in India to figure out chlorination levels and protocol design. We involved two new (four total) water quality tests to follow WHO guidelines. I searched for where to buy these reagents and kits in Bangladesh and in my bedroom made two turbidity tubes because they’re not sold in the country. I pounded out the logistics of numbers, ordering, prices, and how to get these tests to the field.

Next came the field trials. It was incredibly rewarding to teach the field staff how to do these water quality tests. They took a lot of care in doing the tests right and quickly learned how to take data in detail. I still remember being in St. Martin’s on vacation, getting texts at 5 pm every day that read along the lines of “WELLCOME TRACY TO THIS HOT DAY. TURBITY 5, DEPTH 39.7, CLORINE 0, AQUACHECK BLACK. HOW MUCH CLOTECH MIX WELL WATER?” I would instruct them to double the amount of chlorine, then double again, then double again the amount we originally started with. Still, there was no free chlorine residual or antimicrobial effect. This happened in three other wells in Pabna. After three weeks of trials, it was clear our daily low-dose chlorination wasn’t working. But why?
I started some email chains and phone conferences with a chlorination expert at the CDC in the States, and soon we learned why. It turns out that directly chlorinating dugwells is ineffective because 1) there is too much organic matter on the sides and bottom of the well: the chlorine clings to the organic matter and doesn’t stay in the water to disinfect and 2) there is a constant influx and outflow of water, which dilutes the chlorine you add.

Based on this information, we canceled the new protocol but kept the weekly field tests so the field staff and data manager could get used to measuring for and keeping good data. Now, thanks to a connection forged by the CDC expert and Harvard, we are receiving guidance and designs from Innovations for Poverty Action to build chlorine dispensers (see last entry). It will be an exciting pilot to run in Bangladesh and I feel certain it will be acceptable and effective for villagers, and that DCH is the right organization to present it. I just wish I could be there to supervise the project. As it turns out, a Harvard ’12 student who is Bangladeshi will be there to work on this for a month, and DCH is designating someone else to be in charge of it permanently. We’re also looking to engineer some mechanism that can chlorinate the overhead tank for the bigger wells that have tanks.

So: background research, project design, organizational structure, implementation logistics, field trials, failure, finding new directions, taking advantage of a great opportunity that comes – it’s all there. It’s been an incredible project to be part of, and a huge privilege to be at the helm of it as a college sophomore.