Skip to main content

Final Days in a Floating Village by Rachel Muradian

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

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.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.
Post a Comment
Read more

Manufacturing in Phnom Penh by Purva Juvekar

During winter and spring quarter 2017, my teammates and I (Team WASHOut) designed a sanitation station using a Biosand Filter. This was our effort towards providing clean water to students in floating schools on the Tonle Sap lake. We were provided with the opportunity to go to Cambodia and implement our project in person through the Blum grant, and we worked with Wetlands Work!, our clients for the senior design class. Figure 1 Rendering of Sanitation Station   We spent our time at UC Davis designing the station – sketches, CAD models, renderings, dimensions, engineering analysis and testing. We made a prototype in Davis, which we showed during the Senior Design Showcase in June, to test flow rates and water quality standards. The next step was to take the design to Phnom Penh and manufacture it there. We got to work as soon as we got there. My teammate and I were introduced to people on the WW! team who could help with translation, and we began scouting the city to fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing, By Abe McKay

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing (3 of 3) 2017.09.12 In my second week in Kenya, I was back to visiting farmers, both with Vibrant Village and through other connections. However, I receive my biggest surprize in between site visits. I was walking with Ernest Kulali, a field officer and farmer from Vibrant Village, and he was telling me about the effectiveness of farming techniques. Using traditional methods, Ernest was getting 20kg of maize (corn) in a season from his shamba , his farm . When he switched to using purchased seeds and fertilizer, the same land produced 360 to 540kg of maize. What!? I had him run the numbers by me again, 20kgs → the range of 400kgs. I still didn’t believe it, but Nick the Vibrant Village director later agreed that farmers were seeing that magnitude of increase. Not just doubling their income/food supply, but a twenty-fold return! Further farming modifications will not yield as large a jump, but that sort of scale encouraged me that changing te...
Post a Comment
Read more