A large focus of BTB’s design projects is that they can be created from parts locally sourced in the setting they are being delivered to. Having locally available materials ensures potential for production of the device without Rice’s participation or intervention. As BTB’s first design-centered interns in Blantyre, Catherine, Sarah and I have an opportunity to observe firsthand what is and isn’t available here and to shape our design on local materials. Doing this makes it easier for BTB to deliver our technology to QECH with assembly instructions, so that PAM or some other qualified personell could build more without our help.

For the Poly interns, this internship offers a different opportunity. The students at Poly are normally limited in their designs and prototypes to resources that can be found in Blantrye. If electrical parts are hard to come by or very expensive here, students have to design around those components. Therefore, for Charles, Christina, Andrew and Francis, having American friends who can bring materials with them serves as a unique opportunity. They have a chance to exercise their circuit design expertise using parts they may not have access to at other times. Parts from the US are tools for practical experience that makes them better engineers in the long run, and the ten weeks we are in Malawi is a window of time during which they can use those tools.

In practice, our designs have partially been locally sourced and also included some hard-to-find parts that we had sent from the US with other Rice visitors. We kept the circuit for our dosing meter on a prototyping breadboard as opposed to soldering the components so that future Poly design teams could use the components. We sourced everything but wire for our chitenje warmer device from Blantyre, but we had to order the wire online in the US and have it shipped. Our suction pump has a pretty complicated circuit, so a lot of our parts had to be brought from the US, although or initial prototypes used infrared sensors and diodes taken from VCRs and remote controls found in the local market.

Trying to find a balance between local sourcing and bringing supplies comes back to the question of the most important goals of our internship, and how we are trying to accomplish them. We are expected to design prototypes that can be continued into real interventions in a hospital, so that our work makes a tangible impact on the community. That impact is a goal of BTB’s and it is part of the beauty of the program; as undergraduate students we still get a chance to design and build devices that will actually go to patients, as opposed to theoretical problems being solved simply for the sake of our education. When we use locally available materials we are ensuring that our designs have a greater potential to reach the point of patient use.

However, this internship is also a learning opportunity. We are expected to get something out of this summer that will make us better engineers and further our education. Our group of seven is gaining a lot of knowledge on design and iteration, on scoping problems, on working on a team, and on working independently without continual due dates or deadlines to keep us in check. Working with a variety of parts- even those we can’t find in Blantyre- is part of that education. In the long run, the lessons we learn from this internship should help us to become more capable at doing the same kind of work later in our career. It has been interesting to notice the way these two goals intersect and sometimes conflict, as in the example of finding parts. I believe that our team has done a pretty good job of balancing our interests, and I hope that finding our balance will result at the end of the summer with a few strong designs to show for our work.