My Answers to Potential Interview Questions about Helping Rural Haiti Using a Local Miracle Tree by Ishan Shukla, Draft 8/17/15
Rev 8/4/15
Question 1: Tell us more about you and your interest in Haiti • My name is Ishan. I’m 16-years old and a junior at Milton High School
• While I’m an American citizen living in an affluent American suburb, I see myself as a citizen of the world with brothers and sisters everywhere, including Haiti.
o I learned this “citizen of the world” concept last summer while in Costa Rica. It all started when we were on the beach late at night watching a sea turtle come out of the ocean, lay her eggs, and return to the ocean. o Our tour guide said something I will never forget: “We humans should try to be more like sea turtles.” He said, “If you think about it, they don’t think in terms of borders. They swim from California to Costa Rica to Chile, and then back up. The sea turtles aren’t really from any country. They’re from the world.” o I feel the same way. I am fortunate to be born in the US, where I have easy access to clean water, health care, and food. And I want to help those who aren’t so lucky.
• I am particularly interested in helping children in any country with a high mortality rate due to preventable causes, such as lack of clean water. Rural Haiti is a good example. 2
Question 2: Have you ever been to Haiti? • No, but I would love to go. I have been to Niagara Falls on the Canadian side, Iceland, Tanzania, Costa Rica, and Australia. One thing in common between those countries is the natural resources. Haiti, too, is a beautiful country. I’ve only seen pictures but I would love to see it with my own eyes. I want to see if the water really is as blue-green as it looks in the pictures. • I also love studying how civilizations evolve, and I am fascinated by the fact that the most successful slave revolt in the history of Europe and the Americas occurred in Haiti. I love the spirit of the country and would love to one day visit Citadelle Laferrière. Haiti is interesting. Many of the people may be poor, but they are rich inside.
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Question 3: Tell us about your area of interest and how it relates to Haiti • My area of interest has always been to help kids living in poverty in other countries. I didn’t know how to help, but I did know it had to involve 3 things: o Be something that I could afford. If I had a million dollars, I could donate it. But as a teenage kid, I get $30 of allowance a month. So whatever I did couldn’t be costly, yet it had to have a real impact. o Be something simple, something that I can do with limited skills. I’m just a 16-year old kid. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t even have a high school degree. o Finally, I wanted to help save the lives of children. This is a tall order. How can a person who is not a doctor or nurse save lives? But I at least wanted to have a noble goal to aspire to one day.
• It took me years of experimenting to find out what I wanted to do. 4
Question 3, page 2 • I once read that in life, you should pick the 2% that you want to change in the world and then put in 100% effort. • At first I didn’t know what to do. I volunteered for an art teacher. I taught two police officers how to do computer programming. I donated soup cans to a local food bank. I was all over the place. But then, unexpectedly I found my 2%.
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Question 3, page 3 • I was a freshman in high school and went to Spaulding Rehab hospital to interview to be a volunteer. While I was sitting in the cafeteria with my mom and little brother, a doctor at the hospital stopped by to say hello. Her name was Dr. LeRoy, and she was of Haitian descent. • I asked her about Haiti and the impact of the earthquake. She told me that she goes to Haiti several times a year to help. • Often-times mothers
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Question 3, page 4 • Often-times mothers come in with malnourished children. She told me that a tree called the Moringa tree internationally (or benz-olive tree) in Haiti has been found to help malnourished children. • She suggested that I research the benefits of this tree, which I did. I learned that it fights malnutrition effectively, but a new area of research was that it can clean water. • I ended up researching the clean water properties, and found a way to decrease the bacteria count in water by 99%. Professors at two different schools found my results interesting and they want to see if they can replicate it. I am waiting to hear their results.
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Question 4: What exactly are the benefits of the Moringa Tree? • There are 5 main benefitsďƒ¨
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Benefit #1: Moringa Used by WHO to Fight Malnutrition (also supported by UNICEF/WorldVision; NIH named it “plant of the year” in 2008)
Source: http://crazyjamaica.com/?page_id=4455
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Benefit #2: Coincidentally Grows in Areas with High Malnutrition
Note: Can also grow year-round in Southern US: CA, TX, AZ, FL (there are some Moringa Farms in the US)
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Benefit #3: Hardy Plant and DroughtResistant
Kenya
Photo obtained from Google Images
Haiti
Tanzania
India
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Benefit #4: Can be Cooked in Many Ways
My mom grew up eating Indian “Drumstick� Curry (fruit of the Moringa tree, known as Sahijan in Hindi)
Photo obtained from Google Images
Great Moringa recipes exist around the world, e.g. Corn & Moringa soup
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Moringa Powder Used to Make Porridge
Above: Moringa Powder + Porridge Left: A Sengalese woman feeds Moringa porridge to her child Moringa is available in multiple forms
Photo1: http://actionnownetwork.com/home/contents/?p=5400 Photo2: http://www.thecultureist.com/2014/09/19/senegal-moringa-tree-food-poor/
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Benefit #5: Can Clean Water
Can Moringa REALLY clean water? I decided to test it out for myself in my home lab, and found that it really does kill bacteria.
Photo obtained from Google Images
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Question 5: You mentioned you found a way to clean water with the Moringa seeds. Can you tell us more about that? • Sure. First I’ll tell you my methodology and then drill into my experiments
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My Methodology
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First, I obtained contaminated water, either from: • A local brook during a rainstorm when E. coli count is high • Or the above known contaminated site with a leaky sewer pipe
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Second, I put the Moringa seeds in a bowl, removed the outer shells, and crushed them.
Moringa
Control
Moringa
3
I weighed the seeds
Control 4 I put the crushed seeds in a 1 liter or 300 ml container with contaminated water and stirred.
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5 I filtered the water using a cloth filter (in this case, a Bounty paper towel for a consistent micron rating across multiple experiments)
In some experiments, I used a sand filter instead of cloth: • 250 ml gravel on top • 250 ml course sand in the middle • 250 ml fine sand on the bottom Note: This is NOT a bio-sand filter, which has fine sand on the top and gravel on the bottom. Bio-sand filters require that one waits until a biofilm forms over several weeks. My filter does not require this step.
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To test for bacteria, I used Coliscan Easygel from Micrology Labs.
After 24 hours, I read the results. If I did duplicates (which I normally did), I averaged the results. Blue dots = E. coli
Other Notes: (1) I do not count pink dots, as that’s just general coliform (which can come from harmless plants), (2) Each petri dish contains 5 ml of sample. To convert to CFU per 100 ml, I multiply the count by 20, (3) If the count is too high, I put 1 ml in a petri dish and multiply the count by 100 to get CFU per 100 ml.
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Question #1: Does Moringa Remove Dirt? Moringa
Control
Yes!
Time = 0 min
16 min
20 min
30 min
Moringa Control Yes Again!
Time = 0 min
Time = 13 min
Time = 90 min
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Question #2: Does Moringa Kill E. coli?
Initially, only a 55% drop
6860 CFU/100 ml
3090 CFU/100 ml
I asked the VA EPA and MWRA scientists for advice.
Old Way
New Way after people helped me
Cloth Filter
Sand filter
Short wait time before filtering
Longer wait time before filtering
Poor Moringa dosage
Optimized Moringa dosage (determined to be 1.7 to 2 g/liter) 21
The New Way Worked!
93% drop with 30 min settling time
31,900 CFU / 100 ml on May 31, 2015
2210 CFU / 100 ml
Note: The count is unusually high because this was the first flush after one of driest months on Boston record. 22
The New Way Worked Again!
99% drop with 1.5 hr settling time
1940 CFU/100 ml on a dry day Jun 26,2015
20 CFU / 100 ml
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Next Steps • A Wentworth Institute of Technology professor will ask his incoming class to see if my results can be replicated.
Initially 55% E. coli removal After advice 93%-99% removal
• Two NC State professors may perform the same experiments on viruses, not just E. coli bacteria. I may get an opportunity to work with them next summer.
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Question 6: What are the Next Steps? • I think there should be more Moringa research before we use it to clean water. I learned that the EPA funded a $15,000 research study to study the water purification properties of Moringa seeds. • I gave a presentation at a regional EPA conference in Virginia and suggested that they invest more money into its research. • There are 4 reasons why
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Why I Suggest the EPA Does Further Moringa Research
1. EPA has more water purification knowledge than any other agency in the world, including WHO. 2. EPA has a sound research process 3. Moringa has potential US application – could be a sustainable replacement to alum.
From The Water Project Website
4. Vulnerable children would benefit the most. When the US EPA speaks, the world listens. 26
Question 6: (continued) • The other next step is to come up with Moringa recipes to be used around the world. • I am working on one project with Engineers without Borders to come up with recipes for two rural Tanzanian villages. Their major spice is salt so the recipes will be a little limited. But that’s okay. The main goal is to fight malnutrition. • I will also come up with Haitian recipes. I learned that Haitian recipes use many more spices, so I look forward to that project. If anyone has ideas, I am open to them. • I am not a good cook but I will be by the end of this project! 27