Malang, Indonesia

While editing some of my interviews today at the office, I noticed that the photos I was adding were from "more than 7 weeks ago," which makes me wonder where the time has gone and feel a bit of guilt. (I wrote that before my recent two week trip to the US, so let's just round up to more than two months) After my conference in Kuching and stopover in Kuala Lumpur, I traveled to Malang, East Java to conduct a series of interviews with people involved with a vermicomposting network, which will be part of a larger series of case studies on "waste" recovery. It was a busy few days filled with culinary adventures.

First things first: there is krispy kreme in the Jakarta airport.

A taste of home, but with innovative varieties, like peanut butter and jelly!

My time in Malang was scheduled to the brim by my two student assistants from a local university, Dwi and Hana. They did a great job with the pre-interviews and tracking down people without addresses.

They wear Letterman-style jackets from their "Agritech Research and Study Club" and are currently in Japan on a research exchange.

I asked them to act like badass biker chicks next to their motos.

One of the many worm-growing groups who were gracious enough to talk to us about their experiences.

Such healthy worms. Perfect for turning into:

Food for baby shrimp,

Vitality Capsules,

Sports drinks (CHEERS!) and much more!

I was offered worms 4 times. I consumed them twice (sports drink and honey elixir), passed once (worm covered ginger), and brought one back to Switzerland (the capsules) for my friends to try. Two months of sitting on my desk and I have not had any takers, yet. 

Aside from the worms, I ate well. In addition to a stop at KFC in Anto's honor (an Indonesian friend from my master's program who introduced me to Indonesians' love for fried chicken and rice), I enjoyed bakso and other stews (kept and served hot).

A little hard to tell, but I love the presentation.

Also, I ate BRAINS at a Maskan Padang. So smooth!

Roti is basically an Indonesian (?) doughnut (baked, not fried). So good. On at least one occasion I just ate these for dinner after a long day in the field.

Burkina Faso

I was just in Burkina Faso for work. I took my pink messenger bag that I used the last time I was in the country seven years ago (before this blog)!

Two weeks of clothes, field gear and (of course) cleats (for a tournament I went to straight from the airport when I got back to Europe).

We spent a few days in Ouagadougo meeting with government and international development actors and stakeholders. There were also other folks from the institute (past and present) around town, which was neat. Then the team headed to a town a few hours away from the capital, which is known for being the place that the buses stop between Burkina's two largest cities. We used it as a base for accessing the other towns and villages that are part of the project.

Checking out a brand new, never been used, ventilated double pit latrine.

I have over 600 photos from the trip - mostly of toilets and their buildings, but also of residences, water and waste systems, interviews, and workshops. I'll spare you the bulk of them. This was a challenging, but rewarding trip (+ no one I was with got malaria this time!): everything was in French, and it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, but I think we got solid data and a great grasp of the project elements we were studying.

One of the interviews was with the proprietor of a dolo (millet beer) home-brewery/bar. I didn't see any bottles of StarSan, but the women did comment that things were much cleaner since they had a sink basin installed through the program we were evaluating. 

There was no official work on Sunday, so my colleague and I tried to take advantage of the nearby Deux Bales National Park. With hopes of  catching a glimpse of elephants or hippos, we set off after lunch to meet our guide. We did spot some illegal cattle, some flowers, a few birds, lots of termite mounds and something very large in the antelope family running away.

An elephant had been there in the recent past - the guide guessed the day before we were there.

Cool trashcan. The bin is hinged, so the waste can be easily tipped out, but can be covered from rain and some vectors. These were fairly common in the town, but had JICA logos on them. The waste was collected by donkey driven carts, but unfortunately I could not get a photo - I did take a video of what might have been a transfer station, but have not gone through the movies yet.

The coolest paint job of the houses we visited.

A newly built EcoSan toilet. You squat with your rear over the big hole, peeing into the center hexagon, which drains through a hole in one of the corners. This allows the liquids and "solids" to be separated - meaning less smell, theoretically easier hygieneization, and the potential for nutrient recovery.

Haiti

I was in Haiti in April to help run an innovation workshop for a sanitation NGO and look at their operations in two Haitian cities. To learn more you will just have to wait for my dissertation to come out in a few years.

Post-its and ideas galore!

Poop-compost with an ocean view.
To get to this site, we drove through the city dump - basically a DREAM COME TRUE!
(not the way the dump worked, but seeing it first hand)

They are doing some experiments to determine what sort of benefits
come from using their soil additive. 

After all that intense learning and research, there was time for a day at the beach. A thirty minute moto ride from the city where I was staying + another 20 on a boat landed my friends and I on a picturesque beach. As we approached the shore, several fishermen paddled up in kayaks with their catch, which we could then have cooked on the beach. My friends had been there before several times and knew one of the cooks, so they had him negotiate with the fishermen for us. There was time for relaxing on the shore, volleyball, and  snorkeling. I saw coral and so many fish! I had sort of given up on finding a time to go scuba diving, but now I am resolved to make it happen.

Type of boat that took us the last stretch.

Yum :)

My list of sea-life that I saw. I will try to match up the descriptions to images later.
(My google search for "fish that look like pickles" yielded no useful results.)

The beach itself was kind of strange. For the past few years, Haiti has been added as a stop on one of the big cruise lines (rumor has it that they just tell passengers that they are going to Hispaniola Island). Basically the passengers have to stay in an enclosed area with a water slide, zip-line, jet skis and inflatables, but can pay extra to be taken to the nice beach where we hung out. They let non-cruise people go there on days when there is no cruise ship.

You an see the the huge water slide in the cruise stop area.

With a productive workshop, interesting field visits, and a surreal beach experience under my belt, I flew back to the US for some quality family time.

Window seat!

Tanzania

In March I went to Dar es Salaam for a PhD training course on the sustainability of distributed infrastructure. That means we looked at various aspects of small energy, water, and sanitation systems. The course was organized by two different German universities, but there were students from Africa, the USA and other European countries, studying everything from engineering to geography to sociology to architecture. As an undergrad I did a program to bridge engineering and the humanities, but a good chunk of the non-science stuff was a little incomprehensible to me - and even worse for the pure mechanical engineers. I heard some complaints from the human geographers about the technical stuff.

Snack break! The globs tasted like hushpuppies.

Explaining my poster.

The last day of the course we did an exercise where we walked around the city and tried to document some of the infrastructure systems (or lack there of). Street coffee was pretty interesting and quite tasty. Guys walk around carrying a container of coals with a kettle balanced on top and a bucket which contains cups and water for washing.

Mobile coffee solution.

My group found instances of reuse and recycling. This ranged from book binders selling their paper shreds and men chopping up electronics with machetes.

Prices paid for different metals.

The last day involved a trip to a village that was two three five hours from Dar to visit a village where an energy services company was implementing a solar microgrid. Unlike most solar power companies who sell or lease panels to individual households, they install tripods with solar panels and batteries around the village. This allows the system to grow based on the actual (not the expected) demand. People then pay a connection fee and buy chunks of electricity (similar to how you would by pre-paid mobile phone minutes). The generation and load can be monitored in real-time over the cellphone network. The systems don't work with conventional electronics, so the company also retails compatible appliances. After showing us around, one of the founders rode back to Dar with us and was gracious enough to have a conversation about how they operate and a little about their growth strategy. I will probably not use any energy case studies in my dissertation, but it was interesting to think about if any of their approaches could be applied to water, waste, or sanitation infrastructure.

Me in fieldwork-mode (L) and a solar panel tripod with energy box (R).

The direct Dar-Zürich flight leaves quite late at night, so I was able to spend the day with some course-mates at a nearby beach, Kigamboni.

The Dar skyline from the ferry to the beach.

It was a little windy. It was a private-ish beach guarded by masai warriors.

Chipsi mayai - a potato-egg dish with hot sauce. It is eaten with toothpicks, which are not very effective knives.

Get ready for a post dump: accounts of my trips to Haiti and the USA are almost ready to be released.

Stockholm

I just got back from nine days in Stockholm. The first bit was World Water Week, which is the "leading annual global event for concretely addressing the planet’s water issues and related concerns of international development." This year the theme was Water and Energy and there were over two thousand participants, including folks from NGOs, various UN branches, research institutions, multinational corporations, national aid agencies, etc. The weekend was spent with friends from when I had lived there.

World Water Week is intense. Interesting sounding sessions and side events from 9 AM - 6:30 PM, with networking meetings sprinkled throughout, plus social events in the evenings. It is a big enough deal in Stockholm that one of the princesses and the king even made very short appearances (at dinners that I did not attend).  My adviser was part of a panel on business potential of resource recovery in sanitation systems and some other colleagues held a session on Fecal Sludge Management.

Our booth was pretty popular because there were games and prizes,
 including Fecal Sludge Truck card game. Fun for the whole family!

A classmate from my masters course was also there! This was taken at the
Stockholm City hall. The upstairs portion has a magnificent mosaic, which
recounts some of Sweden's history, with mostly golden tiles for quite an effect.

That is ten, count 'em 1-0, men on stage for a panel about how to create the
monitoring system for the upcoming Sustainable Development goals.

My colleagues and I rolling deep at a session with the theme "Water as a Human Right"

I didn't spend much time outside of the conference venue during the day, but I think the conference was worth it. Basically everyone in the water world is there and fairly accessible, so it is easy to get meetings, cement collaborations, and get a sense of where things are flowing. It was even easier to meet with a Swiss professor, who teaches at the same university as my adviser, in Stockholm than in Switzerland because they both travel so often.

People are starting to put a price on water, under the veil of sustainable development, in two ways: selling water futures on commodity markets and selling water benefit certificates (like carbon trading, but with water). I am not sold on either idea just yet, as they seem to be up the green, or in this case blue, -washing alley.

After I got roped into an additional, but beneficial Saturday meeting, I was able to relax sthlm style. This meant joining old friends for homemade dumplings and a rock concert at a bar where I felt old, then waking at a decent hour Sunday to hit the forest to forage for mushrooms. It took three patches of forest before we found any. I was not much help, as I could only identify two safe types (and the species we eventually found wasn't one of them). After picking our fill, we stopped for a late salmon and dill potatoes lunch before heading home to prepare the mushrooms for drying:

Counterclockwise from top right: Fika! Homemade cinnamon bun and coffee for fuel on our search; Frida in the forest; splitting the mushrooms to look for spider eggs; the haul; the dryer filled with mushrooms (didn't smell half as bad as I was promised it would)

Upon my departure Monday morning, I was given a bag of the dried mushrooms, which will make a nice Autumn meal.

On Monday I had a meeting with my thesis adviser about working together on a paper. Some of my work is still hanging around, albeit next to the trashcan...

Thesis Presentations + IEP

Last week at school was pretty chill. We had some conferences to attend Friday, but most of the week was free to attend the thesis presentations of the cohort before us. There were some really great/interesting presentations/internships. It gave me a lot to think about with regard to what I want to do for my thesis. It is interesting to note that one of the presentations that everyone said was the best and "inspiring, even" did not get an A (I missed it), whereas good, but not fantastic ones that I saw did. I noted what questions were asked so that I can be ready to stun the jury this time next year. Several of the projects were in or required travel to Africa or Latin America, which could be fun.
At the first presentation, I took a full page of notes. At the rest of the presentations on the first two days I jotted down a few lines on each. By the third day,  I had pretty much taken to practicing my handwriting and taking down great quotations.

I don't yet know what I want to do for my thesis. We have so much freedom. I think it is more difficult to present, if you do a more business-focused project, rather than a research based-thesis; however, the evaluating juries consist of one faculty member from each consortium school, which means that the audience is really diverse and somewhat non-technical and purely technical report will be lost on them. Additionally, the engineering professors ask trying technical questions (as they should - it's your thesis defense), while the businessy guys propose horrible alternatives to your work. One management professor suggested transmitting hydro-produced electricity from southern-central Africa to Europe, nevermind the fact that you'd be building transmission lines trough countries with 2% electrification rates or that similar renewables programs in northern Africa are having trouble... Europe's demand for non-fossil derived fuels is more important.

 Each evening we had to stand beside the poster we had created for our Integrated Engineering Project (IEP) for two hours. This was poorly organized. No on knew who was evaluating us or how many profs were grading. On the last day, there were 17 posters and 1 professor who had to evaluate everyone's spiel, no one else was in the building, but we still had to stand attentively beside the poster on the off chance that someone walked by. We presented ours 2.5 hours into the session and there were several more to go after us. No one should have had to wait around for that long... my feet hurt so much, that I couldn't go out for the 4th of July.

Nevertheless, our project is pretty cool, we looked at a landfill in Mexico to see what the solid waste management practices were and what we could do about it. The results: barely existent and not much, but we have designed a fairly elegant solution. I'm just a little worried that we have expanded the scope too much and won't have a consistent level of quality in all of the aspects.

The most frequent question was "Why is it green?"

Some of my classmates organized an international dinner for the presenters and the jury members. It was fun to hang out with the older cohort after they were done presenting and soooo delicious. The first dish to disappear was the two Spanish tortillas (due to the large presence of professors from UPM?) followed closely by the homemade Mexican tortilla. Luckily the Mexican tortilla filling last much longer and I was able to create a baguette-taco. I made sweet potato-pecan couscous, an assortment of peanut butter and jelly/banana/honey sandwiches, and (eggless) chocolate chip cookie dough truffles. I stole the following photos form other social media sites:

Before

After

Dessert! Chocolate Cheese Cake, pineapple cups, apple crumble...

Concert and Dancing. (and lots of leftover baguettes)

I'm headed into a week with 8-16h classes every day + 5 exams and a field trip on one day! Yay Wednesday! Then the next week we have one more exam (that we know of, so far) and the final deadline for IEP with the paper, documentation and presentation of the semester long project due.  Then I'm (probably) off to the south of France for a few days before heading back to the States for 3ish+ weeks!