Would you like a side of heat stroke with that monsoon?

I'm going back to Bangladesh for an exciting 30 days of field work at my field site near Dhaka. I'm leaving in early June, as I did last year, for the monsoon season! Our findings up to this point from my site indicate that this is the time of year that E. coli levels are highest in the groundwater. This is likely due to the "first flush" event where the heavy rains after a long dry season, wash all the fecal matter stored up in the soil or unsaturated zone into the groundwater where it can move around more easily. After the rains the unsaturated zone goes from being about 4 m thick to less than 1 m for the rest of the wet season (until September), decreasing the thickness of the highly effective natural filter that unsaturated sand is.

The main thrust of this trip however, is to test the hypothesis that ponds are contaminating large swaths of the otherwise clean aquifer during the early monsoon, by monitoring 6 transects of wells for a variety of fecal indicator bacteria and pathogens. An example of one of these transects is shown below. The pond level fluctuates rapidly, going up after a heavy rain and dropping quickly after, with the disapearing water recharging the groundwater table.



Why does this matter?

Many private wells are drilled close to these ponds, which usually are reservoirs for latrine effluent in rural areas in Bangladesh. If we can show that installing private wells close to ponds in the villages represents an increased risk of exposure to water borne pathogens, these findings may motivate the Bangladeshi government and NGO's to provide guidance to villagers and well drillers, not to drill in these locations. To drill at the other end of the property instead. This would represent a cultural shift for many millions of rural people, but rural Bangladeshis have shown themselves to be willing to take advice about drinking water from their government already. This willingness has been demonstrated by drilling wells in the first place in the 1980's to avoid drinking surface water, and more recently avoiding wells that are high in Arsenic, after extensive testing programs identified millions of wells across Bangladesh that are high in Arsenic.

The science we do has to be excellent, to provide such guidance to such a large and very poor population, where the government and its people have very limited resources. In his book "The End of Poverty" the famed economist, Jeffrey Sachs, has identified Bangladesh as a country that is on the first rung of the ladder in climbing out of extreme poverty. According to Sachs getting on the ladder in the first place is the most difficult and critical step for a country. In travelling back and forth to Bangladesh, I have noticed how well informed our governments and people are when it comes to risks to their health, happiness or life styles. We know that running shoes with gel inserts are better for your joints, that smoking kills you, that driving without a seat belt is signifcantly more dangerous than with one. All these everyday, "common sense" pieces of cautionary advice we receive and pass on, came from top quality, and in some cases highly contentious, in its time, research. Governments in poor countries don't have enough money to fund one side of the debate, let alone the many sides that emerge from a thriving intellectual and investigative community as exists in many western countries.

In his book Sachs also cites technology as one of the top reasons all countries in the world today aren't filled with people dying of disease at 40, as they were two hundred years ago. It is one thing to offer technology to a developing country, it is quite another to teach them how to use it wisely, learning from some of the lessons we have learned along the way. For example, around 1900 there was a major outbreak of cholera in Hamburg, which originated from drinking the water from the Elbe River. Thousands of people died, but this motivated the city to stop discharging raw sewage upstream of the drinking water intake pipe. This sounds like "common sense" today, but there are parts of the world with this knowledge is still absent. In fact, it is doubtful to me that the very basic concept of Germ theory, that many diseases are caused by microscopic life forms that are foreign to our bodies, has caught on in Bangladesh.

I'm very happy to partner with the graduate students and village people at my field site in Bangladesh, learning about their environment and learning about them at the same time. I don't take this task lightly. In North America and Europe we have thousands of scientists and medical researchers who are paid and funded to investigate how our health responds to the food we eat (FDA), the air we breath and the water we drink (EPA) and even our social interactions (NIH). Our longevity is a testimant to the critical role this infrastructure has played. In Bangladesh this research infrastructure is fledgling. So my purpose there is to offer them much of our "common sense" and perhaps even put them on the map for a major discovery that could spill over to helping many countries in similar states of development. I think that hope can be exported, along with goods and services.

First Snow in the Appalachian Mountains

Hiking in North Carolina

Along the TN-NC state line

Market Square Knoxville

My Office (She's writing an exam that I gave to my students)

My desk

Frosty peaks in the Smoky Mountains

More Smokies

Hiking along the Appalachian Trail

Snow covered twigs

Phil visiting Knoxville

Bangladesh at the beginning of the Monsoon

Firewood Rickshaw

Women gathering hay to stacks to keep it dry during a sudden torrential rainstorm


Gifts from the kids during well drilling

Never alone even in the jungle

At the Clinic (Mother and Child Health Clinic) on the outskirts of Dhaka

Very old Hindu Temple in Dhaka

Surveying monitoring well locations

The fascination for computers. I think Microsoft has a huge future market here.

Sand lenses in the transition zone between sand aquifers and clay aquitards on the edge of the sandy village, Chora Para

Cross-bedding in the sand, laid down by the mighty Bramhaputra River

Twilight over Araihazar, the region where all of Columbia's Arsenic Research has been conducted for 7 years

Lucky and Mukta, little sisters at Chora Para (Choto Bon)

Mukta getting my laptop for me, looking quite the future business woman

Swimming Pond on the way to another village

Sunset over the rice fields

Our field workers and students at Dhaka University, Liton and Belal

Concentrating large groundwater samples to look for pathogens

This is the fattest Bangladeshi kid I ever met, the Bangladeshi's would say he's very healthy. They also told me all the time that I was very healthy, and that I had "a very big, beautiful belly" (say it with the Indian accent for full effect)

At Pizza Hut in Dhaka, working on not losing my "big beautiful belly"

Jute, a plant that makes the world's ropes for ships

Coarse sand making up the highly conductive shallow aquifers of Chora Para. Since there is a very shallow water table (Bangladesh is essentially a swamp), all the wells are only 20-25 ft deep, leaving them exposed to fecal contamination from the numerous latrines and ponds throughout the village.

Stratification in the sand/silt layers in a newly dug trench in Chora Para. Fortunately for our geological study, the Bangladeshis are busy digging new trenches all the time, building up their land in anticipation of the wet season. This land was going toward making the foundation for a new Bari (home) for a soon-to-be-married couple within the groom's family's land. In Bangladeshi culture, the man stays with his parents and siblings his whole life, the woman has to leave it all behind, but still is usually able to visit her family often.

Trying my hand at manual labor, in case the academic career doesn't work out. It was really heavy, and I would only make about 2 $ a day doing this! I better work on publishing my papers!

The Megnha River near Dhaka

Visiting Matlab for one day with UNC researchers. Matlab is a region in Bangladesh which hosts ICDDR-B (Internation Center for Diahrreal Disease Research-Bangladesh). It has a long lists of international successes, including the finest most complete epimeology database on a population of 200,000 inhabitants, and the winner of the first Gates' Grant. ICDDR-B has done much to reduce diahrreal disease throughout most of the developing world, not just Bangladesh. Our project is collaborating with ICDDR-B and operating in Matlab to make the most of this database, while building our own water quality and geological databases for comparison.

Taking the quaint little Venetian-like ferry across the River to the field sites, a one hour trip every day involving 2 Rickshaw rides, one Ferry trip, and one motorized Rickshaw.

UNC GPS tools mapping out all the tubewells, latrines, houses and ponds within our projects 6 villages in Matlab with +/- 20 cm accuracy! They will be testing the hypothesis that proximity (closeness) to latrines and ponds increases the likelihood of groundwater contamination being measured monthly by our field workers from Dhaka University. Another crucial step is to see if groundwater contamination (as assessed by E. coli measurements) is even a significant contributor to diarrheal disease rates in Matlab, given the other hygiene issues.

The Rickshaw ride along the embankment protecting Matlab from the Rivers.

Playing soccer at the end of a day of hard work with the kids of Chora Para. It's the only time I've played a sport where the ball was constantly passed to me! Of course I weigh 250 lbs and was wearing big hiking boots, I crushed them! Yeah!! ;-)

A few of the kids of Chora Para. I think I was their hero.

A fishing shelter with bamboo levers to raise the nets out of the Bramhaputra River.

Flying back to the US with crystal clear skies for 1.5 hours over Greenland! It was majestic, awesome, and made me feel small. After being around so many short, skinny Bangladeshis who constantly reminded me that I was really overweight, this was a good feeling to experience.

This picture was near the eastern coastline. The middle was hundreds of miles of white thick ice. If flying over Greenland doesn't give you an inkling of something transcendent and glorious, nothing will. I was thinking that God must have had fun making Greenland and may be an artist to have made things so beautiful. I also think God would have to be a scientist to understand how things work, and an engineer to actually make it work.

My work and time in Bangladesh made me feel many things. I felt small, powerless much of the time. To contrast with this, though, I was made out to be important and famous by the village kids of Chora Para. I thought about how many problems the hundreds of millions of people in Bangladesh and countries like them had, and how few of these problems had anything to do with groundwater or drinking water. They face problems with corruption of their leaders, bullying from richer countries, and most of all, the almost complete ignorance towards them by western countries. Overpopulation, lack of literacy, flooding, labor so cheap that it's easier to hire 10,000 bangladeshis to carry sand on their heads than to buy one crane are a few more. So of course when I thought of making their lives better, I felt impotent, stupid for having such a goal with my small resources and abilities. They taught me something though. That there is no shame in manual labor, and that one can still laugh and be happy amidst all troubles and difficulties. In spite of my earlier thoughts in January ("is hope a western concept") I think they do look towards the future with a kind of hope. It is a country moving forward, painfully, slowly, and living in a swamp. There is so much I think and feel about my friends there I could never write it all down. I think I will be back there soon, and I'm so thankful for the opportunity to co-exist in where I'm from (North America) and where I do my field work for my PhD. I work hard when I go, but like the Bangladeshis, it is with much gladness, because I believe with all my heart and mind in what I'm doing there. "Though outside we are wasting away, on the inside we are being renewed day by day." Thank you all for your prayers and concern for me while I was away.

Back to Bangladesh

I am going back to Bangladesh, leaving Tennessee on June 1. I will be working at Chora Para (Village) shown in previous pictures on this blog. I will be installing monitoring wells and collecting groundwater and surface water samples to bring back to UTK to analyze for fecal bacteria and waterborne pathogens at the Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB). I return to Tennessee on June 27 so stay tuned for more pictures...this time of monsoon season!

Back in a rich western country...

So how does it feel to be back? Good. Safe. Healthier every day. As I gradually recover from post Bangladesh fevers and dysentary, and step back into the life I left 6 weeks ago. But it's not the same. Not for me. Now I look for poisonous snakes along the pathway that I used to jog every day. I also had to work on my trust for other drivers, that they would follow the rules and not try to push me out of the way by honking and intimidation. I think all those things will fade though.

For a while I couldn't really think too much about my time in Bangladesh. There was too much work to do sorting through and presenting the data we collected and continue to collect over there. But I was also reluctant to dwell on what I had seen and felt there. Much was good but much was bad as well. I started listening to Bangladeshi CD's I had picked up over there. I enjoy the music very much now, something about that music resonates within me. I often find that experiences too intense are best experienced afterwards. It's only after that I feel calm enough to process what I have been a part of.

I think being back among friends and family has restored me the most. I don't want to sound overly dramatic but there is a re-entry phase which seems both physical (sickness) and mental and social. Being back in your own culture and language is always empowering compared to being dependent on the good nature of others to tolerate your ignorance of what even a child knows. Our work there is complex, and I don't mean the science. I mean the relationships between the locals and ourselves, and excellent reputation western researchers have in Araihazar where we worked. Although excellent I also feel it is delicate. Like the peace that comes and goes at the campus of the University of Dhaka, where party groups like to deomonstrate violently sometimes. Now there's a military "Care Taker" government, which should soon be replaced by a democratically elected one.

The villages where we worked were totally different than the smoggy, overcrowded, politically charged city. The further you go away from cities, highways and markets, you notice that tempers cool, as coconut trees grow. I like the villages the most.

Bangladesh

Getting on the flight to Dubai at JFK.

Labels that were added to wells across Bangladesh notifying the owners of high arsenic levels.

Rice paddy outside of Dhaka on the way to our field sites in Araihazar

Grad students waiting around at market for pumps to be purchased on the first day in Bangladesh

Matt (UT), Brian (Prof. at Columbia) and myself at our first study site where we spent 4 days

Ultrafiltration apparatus, version 12.0

This guy really wanted his photo taken with me, he looks like a priest to me, but he might just be especially conservative

Filtering groundwater from monitoring wells, virus hunting!

Arrival at Zia International Airport in Dhaka with 31 pieces of luggage

River near site K

Mansion from the time of British rule, pre 1947

Mosque at site C

Rare Hindu temple, 100's of years old, also at site C

Playing badminton with the local boys at site C

Some of my fans, scientific research has never attracted such a crowd! I call the girl in the middle "Kamunga" because she climbed a tree to get me a star fruit, which are very sour. Kamunga = Star Fruit

Our field man in Bangladesh, Belal, who's collecting a lot of data for the project over the next 7 months. We just finished purging the tubewell with 120 pumps. Belal has his masters in Geophysics from U Dhaka and is one of several recent graduates that act as field hands and cultural liasons for American-based grad students and professors.

Geology department library at U Dhaka. Yes Geologists can read, but it takes us a long time, which is why we get our own library.

Rickshaws around the Campus

Special Military Uniform at the airport

Belal and I at Pizza Hut and nothin but

Pizza party back at the clinic where we stayed

Rickshaw ride through Site K village (Chora Para) where I will be doing most of my field work over the next year, likely.

Mud fishing where they dam up a portion of the river and pump all the water out. Then they go feeling through the mud for fish and the occasional poisonous snake. They found one this time and managed to throw it out of the water without getting bittin. Then a little kid with a big stick came along and wacked him on the head. Thinking it was dead they threw it towards me. When it landed 20 ft away in the rice field the grass started to move again, oops it wasn't dead yet. This experience kept me on my toes after.

Measuring vertical hydraulic gradients (up or down) below the numerous ponds in the village. It is our running hypothesis that in the dry season, these ponds are sources of bacteria and pathogens to neighbouring (sometimes only 5 ft away!) wells. Verifying that the gradient (flow direction) was indeed downward supported this hypothesis, so far...

Loading docks along the Bramaputra river near Dhaka on the way to the field sites. I drove over this bridge about 40 times in 3 weeks.

The hand flap method of drilling in Bangladesh. Very effective and cheap. You get the whole drilling team for 100 bucks a day, and they can easily pop in 5-6 shallow wells in that time. It's very effective when they do it, I just sprayed drilling mud all over myself and the guy standing next to me whose job I had temporarily taken over, I think I got fired after that.

A food court in a Dhaka shopping mall. I saw signs for "Canadian Food", "France Food", "Russian Food" but there was no difference between them. They were all hamburgers, french fries and fried chicken.

My field assistant during 3 days of drilling, Mukta, a Geologist from U Dhaka. She was extremely helpful interpreting for me and was eager to learn the more practical hydro work that she hadn't been taught in school.

The village kids at site K, Chora Para (Para = Village)

Karrie, the PhD student from Columbia with whom I now share site K (for Karrie) with.