With the start of this quarter, I am attempting to restart my blog entries -- And so I am back from a week of "Needfinding" in Cambodia.
For one of my classes, "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability", my 4-person interdisciplinary team (two MBA students, one CS, and me) has been tasked to design a water filter for schools in villages in rural Cambodia. We are working with IDE, a non-profit that has been successful in selling home water filters and wants to develop a version for schools.
When we arrived, we initially conducted a sneak-visit on a school that had been given a prototype a year and a half ago to find out if the product was still in use. We arrived to find that the filter was being used, although the tap was broken. They were collecting the clean water in a bucket below the filter. "Okay, so far so good." And then we discovered that all members of the class were sharing a single cup and dipping it into the bucket of water, recontaminating the clean water.
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When we probed a little deeper, we discovered that though the 10-year olds could explain to us that their mothers boiled water for them to bring to school to kill the microbes that live in the water and could make them sick, they had no idea how diseases are spread. "If your mother is sick, can you get sick from her?" "No," all students replied. "If I drink out of this cup and give it to you, is it clean?" "Yes," they said. Students also reported never having seen their teachers or parents wash hands with soap. Schools reported having no money to purchase soap. The village chief reported not prioritizing sanitation because safety was a more pressing concern.
The problem is clearly one that is much wider than we initially anticipated. We went on to learn more general sanitation issues in rural areas. 70% of Cambodians defecate in the fields -- which seems strange until you realize that if you don't understand germ theory and water contamination, the fields seem far cleaner than a latrine. They tried the ad campaign "no toilet, no wife" (which rhymes in Khmer) one year, but the director at UNICEF laughingly explained, "The farmers just looked around and said, 'well I don't have a toilet, but I have a wife, so that can't possibly be true!'"
Our trip was also a lot about learning about the Cambodian people. Everybody we met, from the villagers to the staff at IDE to the Director of Sanitation at UNICEF was incredibly warm and funny. I came away with an incredibly positive view of the sunny Cambodian people. But there is a dark side, as Cambodia is a country that is healing. Just 30 years ago, a genocide ended that killed 1/4 of the population. All those perceived to be educated - doctors, teachers, government, people with glasses - were executed, leaving every person in the country affected. This is something that we found rarely spoken of -- the children do not even learn about it in their school curriculum. When mentioned, tears immediately came to the eyes of grown men we spoke to.
Part of what this nightmarish history means is that today's Cambodians are used to living in the moment and appreciating what they have today. As such, it is hard to convince people of the importance of long-term investments such as preventative health, especially when money is so scarce. Visiting the country and learning its history and the day-to-day challenges of its people has definitely invested our team in our project. I am excited to have the opportunity to work with IDE this quarter.
