Author: Hannah Andersen

Week 7. Final Thoughts

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

It’s been four days since I returned home to Prosper, Texas, USA. People keep asking me if it feels weird to be home. I think people expect me to say something along the lines of “Yes, of course! Everything is so different! What a strange feeling!” And it’s true that lots of things are different. I’m readjusting to driving on the right side of the road. My family and I stopped at Buc-ees on the way from the Houston airport to my hometown near Dallas on the day I got back to the states. For those non-Texans who are unfamiliar with Buc-ees, it’s basically this massive gas station general store. It has every gas station snack you could ever imagine, times ten. I was sleep deprived from over 45 hours of travelling at that point, and I almost had a meltdown when my sister walked my half-asleep self into the Buc-ees. It was something to behold. I had forgotten how absolutely massive stores in the US are. The sheer number of options was unsettling. Another area where the differences particularly struck me was this morning when I went to the GP for my yearly doctor’s check-up. After spending weeks growing used to the state of hospitals in Malawi, the cleanliness and abundance of technology and resources in my GP’s office really struck a chord. As the nurse took my blood pressure, I stared at the mobile BP machine and all I could see in my mind’s eye were the dozens of mobile patient monitors sitting broken in PAM facilities that I visited over the last two months. She took my temperature and all I could think about was the lack of temperature monitors in the labor wards at the hospitals we visited and how nurses often resort to using the back of their hand to guess if a patient has a fever. There are so many differences, and it’s important to recognize them and talk about them.

It is important to talk about the differences between our two countries. It is true that I will move forward being eternally more grateful for all that I have in this amazing country I was lucky enough to be beorn in. I will never again use random and obscure electrical components from the OEDK without thinking about how the Poly Design Studio didn’t have access to a pulse sensor for Nimisha’s team to complete part of their prototype. I will never walk into a hospital or doctor’s office without remembering the babies wrapped in chitenge in the neonatal ward of Queens Hospital. But what I think is a more important thing to say after this experience is not so much how different Malawi and the US are, but actually how we are both the same. While some differences are critical to speak about and deserve attention, most differences are illusions. During our last week, we had a really fancy dinner with our boss, all the interns, a handful of professors at Poly, and people who work in the design studio. Our boss asked one intern from each of the four universities to speak to the whole group on behalf of our cohorts: What had our experience been like? What did we expect coming in to the internship, and what did we take away at the end? It ended up being an emotionally charged moment. All four people who spoke talked about how in the beginning they were afraid that it would be difficult to relate to people from other countries, but how working with and becoming friends with all the interns was actually so easy. Everyone spoke of learning from each other and growing close to people they feared they’d never relate to. I am so, so sad to leave these friends behind. In Tebogo’s speech, he looked right at the US interns and told us “The studio is going to feel empty without you.” I almost cried.

Dr. Ng’Anjo spoke towards the end, and he told us that we shouldn’t let this internship just become an experience in our past. We should keep talking to each other, and we should make sure this week is not the end of something small but the beginning of something great: careers that transcend borders and save lives with technology. He told us to keep talking to each other, because we understand each other and the unique challenges that engineering students in the global health field face. Twenty years from now, we should be reaching out to our friends in Malawi and Tanzania to work together to start startups, help each other network and get jobs, to work at as team on the next generation of medical innovation. More than that, though, I know I will hold these friends in my heart forever, a shining testament to the fact that yes, there are differences between the US and Malawi, but at the heart of things, people are all people. For the many, many people in this world who grow up in homogeneous, small communities, it can be hard to internalize the sameness of people from very different places. But, for people making careers out of global health, or heck, even people just watching the news and voting in elections these days, it is so critical to remind ourselves that the same friends and family in our own backyards who we’d all fight for are the same as people all around the earth, and it’s important to fight for them, too.

Zikomo kwambiri, Malawi, and I will see you again.

 

All the interns on our very very last day in the studio, after final presentations

 

Zikomo (Thank You), Everyone

I’d like to thank the generous donors of Rice 360 for making this internship possible. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have planted a small part of my heart on the other side of the world, and I will always be grateful for that.

 

I’d also like to thank all the staff members and professors involved in Rice 360 and the Polytechnic for your support and guidance throughout these weeks and beyond. It is because of your investment in education that us interns are empowered to shape our lives into careers that might change the world. Thank you for believing in us.

 

To the Malawian interns: Racheal, Maureen, Foster, Boniface, Christina, Chisomo, Tebogo, and Rodrick: Thank you for showing me your country. Thank you for becoming my friends. I know many of you are graduating soon, and I wish you the best of luck with your future careers. I know you’ll all do great. 😊

 

To the Tanzanian interns: Nanah, Betty, Cholo, and Joel: Thank you for being so much fun to live with for seven weeks. It was wonderful getting to know you all and exploring the country of Malawi together. I know our many inside jokes and memories will last a lifetime. Keep in touch. <3

 

Finally, to my fellow Rice interns: Nimisha, Alex, Shadé, Sally, Kyla, Liseth: It was such an honor to get to know you all better than I did before. My life is much brighter now that you’re all in it. I can’t wait to keep learning alongside you. See you in two weeks!

Week 6. Unity and Love

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

I want to spend this blog talking about community. But first, a quick prototyping update.

We spent the week going through many iterations of CAD models and 3D printed parts. We’re still not quite done refining everything, but we got all the most basic functions down. Pictures speak louder than words, especially when it comes to prototyping, so take a moment to check out the progression pictures I crafted in the designs studio below to showcase what we’ve been working towards! All that’s left is to develop the internal membrane, which will be done using silicone casting, and to make sure that the pieces connect well in order to assemble the model.

Prototyping is an iterative process!! This is a central dogma of engineering design. Here are some trachea/larynx piece iterations.

 

Iterations of the piece that attaches to the inside of the nose/mouth holes on the baby doll.

Now that the obligatory prototype update is done, allow me to tell some stories.

A few weeks ago, a student at Poly approached Alex and told him that he interned at Rice last year. His name was Isaac, and he and the other Malawians who interned at Rice alongside him wanted to take us out to dinner! Apparently, while they were in the US, they met a man who owns businesses in Malawi. He told them to take us out to eat at the hotel he owns. So, Alex and Isaac set a date. Fast forward several weeks and we found ourselves in a super fancy hotel, face-to-face with three strangers plus Isaac, about to eat the fanciest buffet I’ve seen here in Malawi. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, I am an introvert. Making conversations with strangers is a bit of a scary thing for me. Knowing that it’s my responsibility to represent Rice 360 and be a pleasant and talkative representative of my university and country, my insides were rolling with apprehension on the whole taxi ride to the hotel. The thing is that all my fears were completely unfounded, because these people turned out to be super wonderful and relatable! We had so much fun exchanging experiences; Their time in the US, ours in Malawi. They told us about how Dr. L made them try tacos, which aren’t really a thing here in Malawi, but they really liked them! She also made them try tamales, which they weren’t as fond of. They also told us that they spent their time hanging out with the old Rice 360 interns from last year, one of whom is my good friend, Franklin! (Read his blog from last year here: Hyperlink to Franklin’s Blog) I realized with a start that they were interning last fall, which was exactly the time that I met Franklin, when we were assigned to be teammates for our PBL project. It’s so crazy to me that he was hanging out with these people on the weekends almost a year ago, while we were projects teammates, and here I am now on the other side of the world, having dinner with them in their home country! Rice 360 has really pushed past borders to cultivate an international community of engineers and students. It’s amazing to be a part of. I’m so glad we met Isaac and the other interns, and I’m thankful to Rice 360 for bringing us together.

Another manifestation of this unique international community of students and engineers occurred this weekend, at Kabula Lodge, where the US and Tanzanian interns are staying. Nimisha’s birthday was Friday, and Tebogo’s was on Sunday, so we decided to have a little cookout. We bought more springrolls and samosas than anyone could ever eat, and fried enough chips (“French fries”) to feed a whole army. Seriously, I have never cut up so many potatoes in my entire life. We made hot dogs and salads and bought soda and snacks. The US and Tanzanian interns spent the whole afternoon frying everything up in preparation to host our friends, the Malawian interns. We decorated the deck of the lodge with balloons, and Joel even bought a small speaker so we could have true birthday party vibes. All last week, Chisomo pestered me with questions about Nimisha: “What type of cake does she like? What’s her favorite color?” He showed up on Sunday afternoon with the most beautiful cake (and most tasty, too), which we had for dessert. We sung happy birthday to everyone with birthdays this month: Nimisha, Tebogo, Racheal, and Foster. It was probably the most fun I’ve had in the last two months. Having everyone come together for food and music and fun conversation beats a safari any day, as far as I’m concerned. The sun set on our fun little patio birthday party, and as the last of the Malawi interns were getting ready to leave, Tebogo told us all: “Thank you for doing this guys. I love spending time with you.” That was so sweet and really resonated in my heart. I was reminded again of how special it is to be a part of this community, to work and befriend and live with engineering students from across the planet. I am thankful that these people entered my life. I’m going to miss them so much, and I will return to my normal life stronger and better, because of them.

All this talk about communities has me thinking about my communities back home – My community at Rice, my community at Lovett. I’ve grown close to so many people who seem “different” from me on the surface. My friends are from Texas, from the east coast, from California, from India and Singapore and Cuba and… you get the point. We might seem different from each other at first glance, but in reality, we are all the same. I might have grown up in Prosper, Texas, meanwhile my friends grew up all over the US and even in different countries, but we all manage to laugh and cry together about things that tie us together – Our experiences at Rice, internet memes, politics, etc. It doesn’t matter what state or country we come from, we are one community. Similarly, I’ve learned during this internship that it doesn’t matter what continent we live on. We are all students. We are a community. We all complain together about challenging classes and exams and sympathize with the panic that comes when older people ask us the forbidden question: “So, what do you plan to do after you graduate?”

I challenge each person who reads this to think about a time when you brushed someone off because they seemed too different from you, so different that you could never possibly connect to them. I encourage you all move forward in your lives looking past these differences. In our hearts, we are all the same people. We love. We cry. We laugh. We are all brothers and sisters in this great big world, and in the face of pressing global issues such as climate change, refugee crises, and worldwide wealth inequality, it is our job to treat every person on this earth as part of one big global community. We all live together on this planet. There should be no outsiders. Only unity and love.

Shadé’s Snapchat saw it first!

 

Happy birthday Nimisha and Tebogo!!! 🙂

Week 5. Prototyping Begins!

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

After three weeks of needs finding, research, and brainstorming, we’ve finally begun to delve into the prototyping phase of the engineering design process. This week, we began to CAD parts, 3D print them, and prepare for the assembly of our prototype.

I should probably take some time to explain my team’s project, since I don’t think I’ve done that yet. We are Team Suction, and we’re working on a neonatal airway deep suctioning training model. I’ll explain what that means in a moment. My teammates are:

Napendael (Nanah) Msangi from Dar Es Salam Institute of Technology in Tanzania
Foster Sentala from Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST)
Chisomo Mbale from Malawi Polytechnic (Poly) 

Different people with different levels of technical and medical backgrounds will read this blog, so I’ll take some time to explain neonatal airway deep suctioning and the approach we’re taking to developing a training model.
Sometimes, babies are born with their lungs and airways full of amniotic fluid, and this prevents them from taking their first breath. In order to remove the fluid, nurses must use a catheter and a suctioning machine. The catheter is a long, thin tube that must be inserted into the trachea of the newborn. One end of the catheter attaches to what they call a suctioning machine, which creates negative pressure in order to suck the amniotic fluid out of the airways of the newborn, enabling them to breathe. There are a few difficulties associated with this procedure. First, it is common for nurses to overestimate the amount of tubing appropriate to insert into the infant’s airways. If the tubing is not inserted far enough, not all the fluid will be suctioned out. If the tubing is inserted too far, past the trachea and into the lungs, the baby will go into respiratory arrest. The second issue is that it’s easy to traumatize the newborn’s airways with the catheter if one isn’t gentle enough. This is particularly difficult to avoid if the newborn is premature or is moving around a lot during the procedure. Trauma to the airways can cause a variety of issues, including scar tissue build-up within the airways, which could restrict breathing. For these reasons, it is critically important that nurses are empowered with the knowledge and confidence to complete this procedure carefully and effectively. My team and I have decided to develop a mannequin-style training model in order to give nurses the opportunity to get hands-on practice of this skill during their schooling years in order to gain confidence and experience before entering day one of their jobs in hospitals.

My team did a LOT of sketching this week during our CADing sessions. I used to be very timid when it came to sharing ideas that were in my head but difficult to convey. All the engineering design work I have done has really given me the confidence to turn my ideas into words and drawings!

On Monday, we were able to visit the labor ward at QECH, where the deep suctioning occurs right after babies are born. We actually entered the ward right after a suctioning procedure had taken place – we just barely missed it! When we arrived, a nurse was wrapping a newly-suctioned newborn in chitenge and connecting them to oxygen.
The most valuable part of our visit was that the head nurse in the labor ward was able to show us an existing training mannequin. It’s used to teach manual airway ventilation, which is a totally different procedure from deep suctioning, but we were inspired by the model itself. It was a blow-up doll with a shell for the face and for the torso, underneath which the tubes reside. Similarly, we decided to use a baby doll. We made a plan to cut off the face and reattach it using hinges, making it able to open and close. The tubing will reside on top of the doll’s chest and underneath its clothing.
We have begun the process of creating CAD models of the tubing and airways. Foster pioneered the CADing process, since he had the most experience with Solidworks. So far, we have CAD models of the trachea, larynx, and airways to connect to the nose and mouth. We have also begun 3D printing these files. We finally managed to procure a baby doll that would work for us (shoutout to Sally for having an extra one from the Ballard Score project).

An initial iteration of 3D printed trachea/larynx. This iteration failed because the snapping mechanism to secure the halves together does not work. Everyone keeps being in shock about how small these pieces are! I keep telling people that babies are so tiny and so are their tracheae.

 

The most recent trachea/larynx iteration with a different attachment mechanism. We’ll 3D print this next week. Hopefully it works this time…

On Friday, we began to dissect our baby doll. We cut off the face of the doll, and spent far too long attempting to reattach it partially using tiny hinges. Who knew that pieces so tiny could prove infinitely more difficult to work with than their normal-sized counterparts?

Behold the reattachment of the doll’s face using teeny tiny hinges. Now it can be opened and closed!

Over the next two weeks, our biggest challenge will be figuring out how to mimic the trauma that can be caused by suctioning. We want nurses to practice on the model and know when they have not been gentle enough. Therefore, we want to include some sort of membrane which ruptures when too much force is used. The membrane would then be removed and observed in order to inform nurses whether they made a mistake. We are considering different approaches to manufacturing this rupturable membrane. Hillary recommended the use of a thin plastic such as tephlon, which could be cut into small strips and secured together at the ends to create a cylinder. I am also exploring the option of molding and casting using a delicate type of silicone. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to special order unique types of silicone molding and casting materials, so we’ll have to improvise if we go this direction.

Overall, I’m thrilled to have finally entered the prototyping stage. As critical as I believe the first steps in the design process are, they can feel arduous. There’s a certain exhilaration that comes during prototyping. It feels powerful to be able to turn the ideas we’ve been discussing for weeks into physical realities. This must be what it feels like to be an engineer.

 

BONUS CONTENT

There’s always time for seflies in the design studio. 🙂

Week 4. Lilongwe

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

We spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week in Lilongwe. There was a pitch competition happening at this place called mHUB. Alongside the Lemelson Foundation and Rice 360, mHUB supports what they call “innovation education”. In other words, they help empower young people to execute their amazing ideas. Ten engineering design teams from different universities across Malawi made it through the audition process in order to compete in the pitch competition on Thursday night at mHUB.

mHUB had a really cool space with some awesome artwork. Naturally, Nimisha and I had to take a picture.

I was happy to see several familiar faces: Dr. Richards-Kortum, Dr. Oden, Georgia, and Raj! We missed Dr. L and Karen though. 🙁 I imagine the 360 office in Houston feels a bit empty these days, since it seems like this is the time of year that many of them travel here to Malawi.

I really enjoyed watching the ten teams present their work. They were beyond impressive. One of my favorite teams presented an app to aid deaf people in Malawi by translating speech to sign language. Another impressive prototype was presented by our friends from MUST! Before we arrived in Malawi and began this internship, they created a prototype for a manual breast-milk pump and delivery system for premature babies who have a hard time latching onto the breast after birth. These young engineers and entrepreneurs are so smart and capable, and it made me think about my own team projects back at Rice, and how our success stories are largely attributable to the endless amount of resources and support that universities in the US offer their students (especially at Rice). I feel so spoiled: In the US, university students have access to labs stocked with any materials we could ever need. At Rice specifically, we have the OEDK, which is a huge facility and features employees and lab techs that are almost always available to give teams technical support. Engineering students at universities in the US have so many resources, and I know students here do not enjoy these same benefits. Don’t get me wrong, the design studio here at Poly is wonderful. It’s enabled so many teams to bring amazing ideas to fruition. But I can’t help but hold in my mind the idea that the OEDK is larger, more equipped, more heavily staffed, and undoubtedly much more funded. I don’t know if I have what it takes to have brought OxyMon to the success it has had if I hadn’t been given everything I needed in the OEDK at Rice.

Rachel presenting the Ballard Score project on behalf of her team!

The issue of funding is not localized to the experience of student-engineers: It is the same at the hospitals we’ve visited. In Lilongwe this week, we had the chance to meet with a medical engineer who works in Physical Assets Management (PAM) at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe. The medical engineer we spoke to was wonderfully helpful, and I’ve made a mental note to put him in contact with Rice 360. He’d make a great project mentor. He outlined for us a list of what he sees are the primary challenges of the PAM at KCH:

  1. Under-staffing
  2. Procuring consumables and spare parts for broken machines
  3. A lack of tools necessary to fix broken medical equipment
  4. Language barriers – donated equipment often comes with manuals in foreign languages, thus they don’t know how to install or fix these machines when they break
  5. Dust and moisture levels are big contributors to equipment breaking down

He told us that these challenges are, in his eyes, the biggest things preventing PAM at KCH from providing and maintaining all the medical equipment necessary for the hospital to function. A quick look at this list tells me that there is one issue that most of these challenges boil down to: financial constraints. Like the teams presenting at mHUB, the staff at PAM in KCH – and truly all the hospitals we’ve visited – are constrained by money from doing the most they can do. Now, I don’t want it to sound like I am pitying these people or saying that they’re somehow lesser than engineers in the US for their lack of funding. If anything, these people are more capable, more resourceful, and 110% more hardworking. They’re forced to find clever solutions to problems that engineers in the US might solve simply by buying more expensive equipment. They work harder: Nanah once told me that she was doing a project for a lab in Tanzania, and her team spent days tracking down one critical part for their circuit. In the US, we’d probably just go to Amazon, use our lab’s money to pay for the part, and receive it in the mail two days later. We are lucky and spoiled, and I am impressed every day with the amazing things that both young engineering interns and staff members in hospitals manage to do despite the constraints they face. I feel more and more grateful for the resources I have access to in the US, and I feel a sense of renewed devotion to make the most out of my time at Rice in order to truly take advantage of what Rice offers and prepare myself for a career being the best I can possibly be.

This is a photo from PAM in KCH. It’s a whole wall of broken patient monitors. Many of them have broken probes. Probes (such as temperature probes for a thermometer) are very delicate and break often. Unfortunately, they are also expensive to replace. Sometimes, replacement probes are sold for more than the cost of the actual device! Broken devices are kept around so that parts can be salvaged for less-broken devices. For example, an oxygen concentrator with broken sieve beds might be kept around so that its compressor can be salvaged when another concentrator needs a new one.

My favorite moment of the week happened the night before the competition. That day, all 19 interns from the US, Malawi, and Tanzania traveled five hours from Blantyre to Lilongwe. We stayed in a hotel together, and after dinner we all gathered in someone’s room to help Alex’s team practice their pitch. Presenting on their team’s behalf was Rachel from MUST. It was a challenging pitch, because all the information had to be presented in under four minutes! I thought it was really special to witness all us interns gathering together at 10pm on a Wednesday night to support Alex and Rachel’s team (also including Betty and Rodrick). It wasn’t work hours, we didn’t have to be there, but almost everyone was present, sitting, listening, and offering advice. We were all genuinely invested in the success of their team, despite having our town teams to worry about, and I found that very touching. As much as stereotypes characterize engineers as being anti-social, loners, or bad at communication, I’ve witnessed us being exactly the opposite. Especially in global health, us engineers are a community. Rather than competing with each other, we work together, and I’m so grateful to be working in this field with these people.

All the interns gathered in the hotel to listen to Rachel present and give her feedback

Week 3. Getting to Work, an Alternative Approach

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

This week I’ve been deconstructing my perception of productivity and work. Western cultures such as the United States have a particularly intense approach to work, relative to other countries. We emphasize productivity, efficiency, speed, and punctuality. I grew up seeing myself as a strongly Type A personality, as most Rice students are. I value structured schedules, and I feel infinitely bad when I’m late to a meeting. American culture really lends itself to Type A personalities: Everything is incredibly streamlined. When I go to Starbucks in the United States, there is a predetermined script, and this script barely deviates each time.
“Welcome to Starbucks, what can I get you?”
“I’ll have a grande iced caramel macchiato.”
“Can I get a name for that order?”
“Hannah”
“Thanks, Hannah, we’ll have that right out for you!”
It’s essentially the same exact words every time, no matter what city I’m in or who’s working the register. This makes the interaction super fast and maximizes both the amount of customers Starbucks can serve and the amount of errands I have time to run in one day.
Things are less streamlined here in Malawi. Last Sunday, we shopped for groceries at the Blantyre market for the first time. It was nothing like any grocery-shopping experience I’ve ever had before. For one thing, you need to talk to a completely different person for each item you want to buy. One woman will sell you tomatoes from her beautiful, shining tomato-piles on the sidewalk, then you’ll buy rice from the man at the nearest rice-booth, then you’ll attempt to haggle for oranges (They tend to ask for more money from foreign-looking people like us. 500 Malawian kwacha for one orange? Heck no. We’ll buy them for 100 MWK each, please and thanks). It was great, because everything was so much cheaper at the market than it was at the grocery stores we’d been using before. But, if I’m being honest, the bustle and chaos of the market was a bit much for me. I’m an introvert, and many people compounded with a lot of stimulation is difficult for me. I’m used to shopping alone. In fact, I love grocery shopping in the US. It’s relaxing to take my time perusing each isle in peace, alone with my thoughts. But “alone” is not something that exists in the shopping world of Malawi.

The Blantyre Market

From grocery shopping to scheduling important meetings, everything that the US streamlines is approached differently in Malawi. From the market to the work-place, the pace here is different, and less streamlining demands more focused human-to-human interaction. Based on everything I’ve said so far, it shouldn’t surprise readers to hear that my introverted, Type A self has been struggling with an increased demand for engagement with my surroundings and a more culturally laid-back approach to productivity. I’m used to having each day scheduled out down to the minute, from dawn until 2am. That’s just the life of an engineering student at Rice. However, I quickly learned that my approach to work is different from that of my teammates. As someone who’s been through the whole engineering design process several times before, I thought that I was supposed to be a leader of my team. I spent our whole first week pushing them to match my pace and get as much done each day as we could. Unsurprisingly, I felt some resistance. I know what it feels like to be a leader who is failing to maintain investment from their team, and that’s exactly what I felt during the first week. I was struggling to change the pace that I have been socialized for 20 years to maintain.
During last week, week two, we had a pretty atypical work schedule. On Wednesday afternoon, Dr.L, Karen, and Raj from the Rice 360 office in Houston showed up and spent the day in the design studio. All the Rice interns were so excited to see them, especially since we know that Dr. L’s time at Rice 360 is ending soon. She immediately brightened up the room with her warmth, and we were quick to embrace her in a group hug. It’s an understatement to say that we’re going to miss her so much.

Dr. L and I wearing our matching Rice quarter zips! This photo was taken shortly after all four of us Rice engineering interns attacked her with a group-hug. 🙂

Another atypical event from last week occurred on Friday afternoon, when a few dozen kids showed up in the design studio. Educators at a secondary school were collaborating with faculty at Poly to show secondary school students around the university. They came into the design studio and asked us all to talk to the kids about our work as engineers. Apparently, it was all an effort to convince many of these kids that their educations didn’t have to end after secondary school; College could be a meaningful and accessible opportunity for them. Educational outreach is very near-and-dear to my heart. It was a lot of fun to watch all the interns talk to the kids about our projects and show off various technologies in the design studio.

While some interns were showing the secondary school kids the laser cutter, lighting up Arduino LED circuits, and talking about our projects, I decided to stop thinking about how stressed I was about my team’s progress and let myself goof off a little. I noticed some scrap wood near the laser cutter and thought it would make for nice pictures of Nimisha and Joel. 🙂

As fun and exciting as all these schedule deviations were, I won’t sugar-coat the fact that they were interruptions. While the fact might be that this week was full of interruptions, the truth is that these interruptions were actually a blessing in disguise. They were completely necessary for me to learn how to slow down and engage with the world around me. I had been struggling with a socialized pressure to work quickly, efficiently, and maximize productivity, and I tried to force a team of Malawian and Tanzanian interns to match my pace. By being forced to slow down, I was given the opportunity to take a breath. I was able to spend some time goofing off with my team and some of the other interns, and it made me feel so much more comfortable in the design studio. Paradoxically, these interruptions actually made my team more productive.

This picture is dedicated to Karen, who was super excited to hear that the engineering design process officially condones sticky-note usage for brainstorming sessions.

A happy team is a functional team, and after forcing myself to slow down, I could feel my team start to meet me in the middle. I tried to impose an American standard onto an international team of engineers, and I am now learning from my teammates that a western approach to work and productivity is not the only path to success. By slowing down, we are given the opportunity to truly engage with each other, our environments, our clients, and ourselves. As a biomedical engineering student with a future career in global health, learning how to slow down and engage is critical. Like I said to the Biomedical Engineering Student Society when Christina asked me to speak at their inaugural event last weekend, it takes a particular type of person to study bioengineering, as opposed to other engineering fields. Bioengineers care about people. We want to help, to serve. It’s ultimately a love for our communities that drives our studies and our successes, and in order to truly serve our communities we need to learn how to slow down and authentically engage ourselves in the people and places around us.

BONUS CONTENT:

All the engineering interns from MUST, Poly, DIT, and Rice, jumping for joy with Dr. L, who will be dearly missed. <3

Week 2. Diving In

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

Similarly to the way this week went, I’m going to start this week’s blog by diving right into the details.

The first two days were focused on introductions and skills. We got lectures on the Engineering Design Process and Human Centered Design, and we broke into small teams to do a short, fun design challenge! This was my first time truly experiencing how clever and driven all these other interns are. They had ideas I could have never fathomed, and the whole experience was a lot of fun. On day two, we broke into groups to learn some skills we might need for prototyping. One group spent time learning about CAD and 3D printing, meanwhile I was in the group learning about Arduino and electronic prototyping. This might sound a little silly but as Andrew walked around and around our table explaining how microcontrollers work and how they fit in the context of an Arduino board, I could feel something that in that moment I could only describe as magic. I could feel everyone around me learning and growing and I could feel myself learning and growing alongside them and it was, just, magical.

This is the circuit we made to practice using an Arduino! We programmed it such that we could use a potentiometer to control the brightness of an LED.

 

Interns learning how to use the laser cutter!

Later that day, we got assigned our project teams! I’m on Team Suction and we’re working on a training model for nurses to practice the neonatal airway suction procedure on. My teammates are Nana from Dar Es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT) in Tanzania, Foster from Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST), and Chisomo from Malawi Polytechnic University (Poly).  They’re all lovely and I’m excited to get to know them more during the course of this project.

This is a neonatal suctioning machine at Zomba Hospital. Basically, sometimes babies are born with their airways full of amniotic fluid, which makes them unable to take their first breath. When this happens, a nurse puts a few centimeters of a tiny suctioning tube through their nose or mouth and down into their trachea. The suctioning machine creates pressure that removes the fluid and allows the baby to breathe! Team Suction has been tasked to create a training model so nurses in school can practice this technique more before they begin working in the hospital setting.

Before this internship, I’d worked on four different design projects during my four semesters at Rice, but I’ve never had the opportunity to immerse myself as fully in a problem space as I did this week during our hospital visits. After being assigned to our teams on Tuesday, we were given the opportunity to spend Wednesday and Thursday at Mulanje District Hospital and Zomba Central Hospital. These visits really accelerated the first few steps of the Engineering Design Process, as we were able to speak to the users themselves in the environments where they would be using our technologies.  In a span of 48 hours I went from never even having heard of neonatal airway suction to having heard five different nurses from three different hospital wards explain to me the procedures and common complications. It took weeks of research at Rice last semester to get this much information about OxyMon’s problem space, and we were able to accomplish this all in only two days thanks to these hospital visits.

   

Speaking of OxyMon, I was able to utilize these hospital visits to get some information about oxygen concentrators to bring back to my team as we continue our work next semester. After having spent months researching the ways these concentrators are used and maintained in hospital settings in Malawi and working on prototype after prototype, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to witness the problem space and user environment live and in person. I was able to take pictures of concentrators being used in neonatal wards at Mulanje and Zomba, and I finally found out what types of splitters actually get used to connect patients (something that has been a pressing mystery to my team for many weeks). The most interesting part was our visits to the hospitals’ Physical Assets Management wards, or PAM for short. This is where technicians take broken devices to be fixed and where unfixable devices go to sit in what Rice 360 likes to call equipment graveyards. Dr. Bond talked to us about equipment graveyards at the very beginning of class last semester, and I’m having a hard time believing that I went from looking at pictures of broken equipment on a projector screen in the BRC in January to actually physically being here in Malawi, being the one taking the pictures myself. I won’t go into too many more details here in this blog, even though I’d love to write a whole report on my findings from this week (Nimisha keeps making fun of me, because apparently all I talk about are oxygen concentrators. I’ll spare you the same suffering she’s undergone as my roommate, listening to me talk about oxygen concentrators every day). Stay tuned for new iterations of OxyMon next semester, better than ever thanks to my time spent in Malawi!

This is a photo I took of the “equipment graveyard” at the Physical Assets Management of Zomba Hospital. Pictured are many broken oxygen concentrators and other broken devices. We were told that most of the broken ones that had been sitting there for awhile were older and stranger models that had more difficult-to-replace parts.

 

An oxygen concentrator I found being used in Zomba Hospital! (tiny baby attached but not pictured)

 

One of the two types flow splitters I observed, used to connect multiple patients to a concentrator. This will be useful information for my team next semester as we determine how OxyMon would be connected to a concentrator.

Me looking super happy after gaining a lot of information from the man working at Physical Assets Management in the hospital

Even though we’re done visiting Mulanje and Zomba hospitals, we are extraordinarily lucky to be positioned down the street from the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH, or Queens). Our teams have access to Queens for the next several weeks as we begin prototyping, so we’ll be able to get all the necessary feedback. Next week, we plan to write a proposal of design criteria and present to nurses at Queens on Wednesday to ensure that we begin these projects with the correct direction in mind. For Team Suction specifically, we intend to find out exactly which difficulties of the suctioning procedure to focus our training model on.

Of course, we’ve being doing fun-stuff and life-stuff on top of immersing ourselves in our first week at work! Between the 11 of us living here at Kabula, we’ve split ourselves into mini teams to rotate the responsibility of cooking for our whole group each night. It feels like we’re having a big, family dinner every night on the deck at the lodge, and it’s a blessing to be growing closer to my fellow interns each week. My mini cooking-team made tacos last week. We persevered through a fridge that accidentally froze all our vegetables and the fact that all taco shells here are imported and unreasonably expensive compared to other foods. It ended up being a pretty successful meal for 11, all things considered!

We were also able to stop by a lodge at the bottom of Mount Mulanje on our way home from Mulanje Hospital. Some of the Malawian interns told us that some people believe spirits live at the top of the mountain. Apparently there’s a particular area on the mountain that people say not to hike under any circumstances whatsoever in order to avoid being taken by the spirits – people who go there tend not to come back. On the drive back, I saw that the top of the mountain was hidden by an eerie cloak of fog, and I could totally understand how one might feel that the top of the mountain might be home to malevolent supernatural beings.

   

Week one was truly a headfirst dive into life in Malawi and work during this internship. From meeting our teams to hospital visits to figuring out how to cook for 11 people every night, I feel so lucky to be learning and growing alongside so many wonderful, bright, caring young people.

BONUS PICTURE of what happens when the communal fridge gets too cold and all your vegetables freeze on taco night so you have to heat them up on a half-functioning stove 🙂

 

Week 1. Arrival in Malawi

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

In the last week, I spent over 40 hours travelling 9000 miles away from home. I tripled the number of continents I’ve visited and more than doubled the amount I’ve countries I’ve been to. The long journey was equal parts challenging and thrilling, and it was made especially fun by the fact that it was shared with five of my amazing peers and fellow interns. (Seven once we finally met up with Kyla and Liseth in Johannesburg!).


Between the five of us that flew out of Houston together, we had 11 checked bags, each weighing 50 pounds! Six of the bags were filled with supplies for the MUST university design studio.

I was a bit apprehensive of flying multiple 10+ hour flights in a row. Before this week, I had never been on a plane for more than three hours before. Luckily, I had good company to get me through all those hours (shoutout to Nimisha for teaching me how to deal with long flights). Our first stop was London, where we had a 10-hour layover! It was like a dream come true to be able to leave the airport and explore Harry Potter’s city. We saw lots of iconic sites that will definitely make my mother jealous: Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Westminster, Big Ben, the London Eye, etc. My favorite part was seeing Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station.

This is a photo I took of the flight tracker on the screen in front of my seat on the flight from Houston to London. I can’t believe I traveled all the way across the ocean!

 


Here is the five of us who flew to London in Trafalgar Square during our layover.

After the London layover, my travel memories become a bit blurry, because this was 20+ hours into the journey and I was a bit sleep deprived. We took an 11-hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, where I slept almost the entire time. After this was smooth sailing (not counting the couple hours our next flight was delayed) all the way to Lilongwe, Malawi. Here, we met the wonderful and warm Mr. Richard – the bus driver that drives Rice 360 employees and students between Lilongwe and Blantyre whenever they visit Malawi. He explained that he’s known “Rebecca and Maria”, Dr. Richards-Kortum and Dr. Oden, for over 10 years! Shortly after meeting him, we met the four interns from Tanzania who are living with us at Kabula Lodge and working with us at the Polytechnic University. They were so friendly, and I can’t wait to spend these next two months getting to know them better.

We spent our first night in Malawi in a hotel in Lilongwe and traveled four hours the next day to reach Kabula Lodge, where we will reside for the next two months as we work. It’s about 10 minutes away from the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (Queens) and the Malawi Polytechnic university (Poly), where we will be working most days. The valley in which the lodge sits is beautiful. We’re surrounded by rolling hills and mountains covering in sprawling trees and flowers. No view in Houston could ever be as breathtaking as the one from the balcony on which we eat breakfast every morning here.

The view from the Kabula Lodge is so beautiful!

Yesterday, we dropped by Queens and Poly to meet some of the people we will be working with over the course of this internship. Some of the Malawi interns even gave us a brief tour of the university! Lots of their buildings are painted this really nice light blue color, which is refreshing after spending four semesters surrounded by the dark Rice navy and gray. We got to see the design studio, too. The people there were incredibly friendly and seemed excited to start working with us on Monday. It’s Saturday morning as I’m writing this, and I have many conflicting feelings. I’m both excited and nervous to get to work. I can’t wait to learn from the Malawian and Tanzanian interns as I work with them. I’m nervous because I know that this internship is going to challenge me. I was initially convinced that the most challenging part of this internship would be the times my engineering skills will be pushed and expanded. Now, I’m realizing that the most challenging part of this internship is going to be pushing my communication skills and confidence. As scary as that sounds to me, I’m more than looking forward to the growth that will come from these challenges, and I can’t wait to get started.

Here’s a bonus picture of Nimisha after tucking in her mosquito net! I couldn’t have asked for a better roomie. 🙂

Week 0. Preparations in the OEDK

Posted on by Hannah Andersen

Hello all!
Welcome to my blog, where I will be documenting my experiences in Malawi through the Rice 360 Summer Internship over these next few months. I’m indescribably excited for this summer, and I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.

Before you commit yourself to spending several weeks following me and my blog posts, I should tell you a bit about myself.
My name is Hannah Andersen, and I’m a rising junior here at Rice University. I went to Prosper High School in Prosper, Texas, where my family still lives. I live at Lovett College, where I’m currently involved as the Outreach committee chair and Head Peer Academic Adviser. In my free time, I love pursuing the perfect cappuccino. I can often be found taking study breaks at Rice Coffeehouse or the Starbucks across the street from my dorm!

I’m pursuing a BS in Bioengineering with minors in both Global Health Technologies and Engineering Design, which means that I’ve spent a lot of time working on engineering design projects. Some examples of my past projects have been a physical therapy model for Texas Children’s Hospital and an exhibit for the Children’s Museum of Houston. My most recent and favorite project by far was through Rice 360’s design course: GLHT 360. This is where my teammates and I created OxyMon – a low cost monitor of oxygen concentration to be used on oxygen delivery machines in low resource settings in order to alert clinicians when patients are not receiving enough oxygen. Oxygen concentrator machines are vital for patients, especially infants, with respiratory distress. However, these machines break often, so our device aims to inform nurses and technicians about the concentration of oxygen actually being output by these concentrators and to alert clinicians when the concentrators are broken. One of my teammates and I will actually be taking OxyMon to Malawi (and Tanzania, in the case of my teammate, Matthew) this summer in order to get authentic feedback to guide our work on the device next semester! Very exciting.

Making more prototypes to travel with us has been the main task of this time spent preparing in the OEDK. Matthew and I have actually decided to roll out a second version of our device, which we’ve dubbed OxyTech, in order to get feedback on two different approaches to our problem space. This lead us to a super fun adventure to a store called Electronic Parts Outlet last week in order to get some supplies. Before then, I’d never seen so many different electronic parts at once, not even in ELEC 243 lab last semester. Most of our time lately has been spent planning for the building of extra prototypes of our old design (OxyMon) and the creation of initial prototypes of our new design (OxyTech). The goal is to make enough to bring two total to both Malawi and Tanzania – one OxyMon and one OxyTech per country.


From left to right: an image of the original OxyMon, the guts inside the original OxyMon, and some pre-assembled components and casing for the new OxyTech design

In addition to prototyping, everyone has been dedicating this time to the necessary preparations that come alongside international travel, such as getting vaccines and prescriptions for anti-Malaria medication (I just picked up 70 anti-Malaria pills yesterday! Boy, were they expensive). And of course, there’s the less official preparations, such as downloading a bunch of movies and music in anticipation for having unreliable wifi at our place of residence in Malawi.

These types of preparations are making the upcoming trip feel more and more real every day. Faced with equal parts excitement and nervousness, I am hesitant to preach to everyone around me that I’m about to have the Unequivocally Best Time of my Life™. Because my family is only five hours away from Rice, I have never gone this long without seeing them before. While my heart yearns to see more of the world, as much as I can, I know that this summer will be full of just as much homesickness as it will be full of wonderful new experiences. It’s going to be amazing, but it’s going to be hard, too. We’re going to have to learn how to take care of ourselves, how to balance a busy work schedule with basic tasks such as cooking and laundry (which I hear we’ll have to do by hand!), how to work on a team with people from very different backgrounds, how to “lead gently” as Dr. L says. If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far during my time here at Rice, it’s that I should not expect everything to go perfectly all the time. In fact, I should definitely expect lots of things to go wrong. I should expect myself to experience failures along the way. But, as the days go by and our departure draws nearer, I am focusing on the idea that it is through our failures that we learn the most. So, I can’t promise a summer of wild success stories where we all go to Malawi and save the whole world in one grand, victorious sweep. But, I can promise that I will work hard every day. I will work hard to lead a design team of students from Malawi and Tanzania, I will work hard to get feedback for OxyMon, I will work hard to engage in needs finding, I will work hard to get to know all the new people around me (both my fellow Rice interns and everyone in Malawi), I will work hard to understand a new culture, and I will work hard to improve myself both as a woman in engineering and as a human being. This is the learning experience of a lifetime and I will work hard to take advantage of that.

That being said, I also intend to have some fun along the way. 😉

Stay tuned for more posts in June when the adventure begins!

Cheers,
Hannah