It is very different going from
working on a project with a theoretical focus and with a remote location to
working more closely with the knowledgeable folks here in Cambodia, seeing the
project worksite, and bringing our project to life. The Wetlands Work! team
plus our advisor, Dr. Moore, have been great about helping us out, and pushing
us to think outside of the box - to think of simple solutions, to look at the
project from a different angle, and to get rid of any assumptions that may be
blocking that process.
 Image 1: Hakley drilling a connection point |
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| Image 2: Hakley doing his master builder thing, with Yao and Virak supporting the st |
For the last 6 months, Joanne, Yao,
and I have been working on a project with Wetlands Work! for our senior design
project. Wetlands Work! develops sewage treatment systems for communities
of floating houses that live on the Tonle Sap Lake. The area of the project
that we directly worked on was developing a frame that would physically support
critical areas of the sewage treatment that were breaking. Wetlands Work! has
been developing a solution, separately from us, that was very similar to ours,
but ours was more expensive. Thus, there was little point to move forward with
implementing and testing our original solution, since the current system is
already too expensive at $150. This was definitely another adjustment -
especially as we worked hard to developer another solution that we could create
to help WW! After several failed proposals, it seemed that we would never be
able to design a feasible system that we could build and test before we
left.
But thanks to the hard work of my
teammates, Virak (who worked at Wetlands Work!), and Hakley (a man who lived in
the floating village and who is also a STEM teacher to middle schoolers,
experienced with building, and just was the best help anyone could have been),
we ended up reaching our goals with respects to the building progress we wanted
to make. One of the things we built, a stilted support for the HandyPod to be
used with stilted houses on the lake, was quite successful. The other thing we
worked on was a hand crank that was ideally supposed to reel in extra tubing
needed due to the fluctuating water levels. This project did not work quite as
well; for me this was a hard thing to accept. To have come all this way, spent
so much time designing, and then to not have anything to show for it - to not
have been able to help WW!? However, I've come to realize that because we spent
time creating a good design and then we built the system, and it didn't work,
that is an avenue that Wetlands Work! doesn't have to go down. So in essence,
the failure wasn't actually a failure.
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