This week did not go to plan. When I was first thinking about writing this blog post, I figured I would spend the whole time talking about the city of San Cristobal, the water inequalities faced by the people here, and the beginning of our projects. Alas, as I said before, this week did not go to plan.
For now though, I will talk about San Cristobal! It’s an absolutely gorgeous city, mostly free from all the hustle and bustle that comes from living in Mexico City. Almost everything is walkable, and if it isn’t, all you have to do is wait in your street for a couple of minutes for a taxi to come pick you up. Long gone is running across a 4 lane street hoping not to get hit by a car, instead I only have to worry about crossing tight bridges.
One of the many pedestrian streets in San Cristobal.
Despite all the differences between Mexico City and San Cristobal, a few stark similarities remain. There is a massive water problem here, and although it’s not for the same reasons as in Mexico City, the fact remains that there is a large rural population in both cities that do not have access to clean water. In a country that seeks to take the final step to being considered “developed”, the fact that Mexico has this problem not just in one city, but across the entire country is a massive issue, that hopefully I’ll get to learn more about.
Mexico City and San Cristobal; so far apart, yet so similar
As part of our learning about the water problems, we made a visit to Cantaro Azul, which was one of the most fascinating companies I’ve seen. Their flagship product called “La Mezita Azul” was a very interesting one, because from the outside it looks like a design that would be typical of engineers to make. However, where it really stands out is the details in how La Mesita Azul is specifically made for the people of the Chiapas community. Instead of focusing solely on efficiency and efficacy, Cantaro Azul acknowledges the fact that it’s difficult for people to get used to a water system that hasn’t been present in their lives previously. Instead of just forcing this product onto them, they try to integrate the design into their lifestyles. For example, a common way that Cantaro Azul keeps their water jugs cold is by wrapping them in denim. While there are better alternatives available, the people were already using denim to keep their bottles cool, and Cantaro Azul adapted this tradition into their product. To be completely honest, without seeing them come up with this solution firsthand, I don’t think I would’ve even come close to this thought process. Seeing how Cantaro Azul works with their community really changed how I go about engineering, and will help me on our project here in San Cristobal.
La Mesita Azul, here missing it’s denim cooling protector.
As for the project itself, we were given the choice between a UVC sanitization box and a water collection system. Even though I’m a finance major now, when I first came to Rice I was a Civil Engineer with a focus on renewable energies, and specifically solar energy. So, anything concerning light is interesting to me. I got lucky and got my preferred choice, and am now a proud member of team Lions (Liam) Never (Nancy) Bite (Brian) Jalapenos (Jordi).
Team LNBJ
While working on the UVC box, I made sure to keep the aforementioned topics I had learned from Cantaro Azul in mind. Specifically, since the box was made to sanitize baby bottles using UVC, we had to make sure that we were properly targeting our demographic, and that the demographic would actually use it. So instead of just building a UVC box that would perfectly perform the task of sanitizing a baby bottle at maximum efficiency, we knew we had to compensate efficiency for convenience to make sure the mothers would use them.
A variant of a UVC box called the Munchkin 59s.
That should’ve been the end of the week for me. Instead, at 7:40am on Saturday, I felt an acute pain in lower abdomen. Slowly but surely, within the next hour it spread to my lower right abdomen, and suddenly I was in a taxi on the way to the hospital (thank you Nancy and Jordi for helping me with the ride there). I got an IV bag hooked up, got some blood tests taken, lost a lot of blood to the floor, and only a couple of hours later found out I had appendicitis and needed to enter surgery immediately. I wasn’t fully under during my surgery, with only my torso and below sedated, so I got to feel the surgeon playing the drums on my leg while my appendix was being removed. Only an hour later, I had zero appendix, and 48 hours left in the hospital.
(A picture of my appendix would go here, but unfortunately I somehow have no photos of it)
One thing that I want to mention, however, is how outstanding the iSEED teachers and organizers were throughout this process. I was fully ready to just go into the operating room and have that be that, but Dr. Loyo stayed at the hospital for almost the entire day and made sure that I was doing alright the whole time. He checked up on me, helped get me into surgery, and helped translate everything the doctors were saying, among so many other things. Dr. Hunter and Amy were constantly checking up on me as well to know if everything was going alright, and helped me with the entire process of actually having to be in the hospital as well. Without everyone at iSEED I would have been lost, entirely up to my own devices of having to navigate the ordeal that is a 48 hours hospital stay, and I would truly like to thank them once again for everything they did for me.