It’s hard to believe that we are almost to the halfway point of this summer program! While we have made great progress in our project as you can read about in my teammate Kenton Roberts’ blog post for week 2, I spent a lot of time over these past few weeks reflecting on my project’s problem space: the global water crisis. 

Globally, 844 million people don’t have access to usable water. Access to clean water is a crucial stepping stone for development. Without it, people are not able to practice proper hygiene and sanitation. Children get sick and are less likely to go to school. Parents worry about and tend to water-borne illness and struggle to make a living. This past fall semester, I had the opportunity to take the course BIOE365: Sustainable Water Purification for the Developing World. One of the first things we learned in the class was how the term “developing world” is misleading and often reductive to the countries which are included. It groups countries as a whole into a category of low social and economic metrics. However, oftentimes crises we relate to “developing countries” are crises which are occurring in the daily lives of the vulnerable people in the US: communities of color, low-income people residing in rural areas, tribal communities and others. 

For example, the water crisis is often a problem we don’t consider to be one in our own state or even in our country. However, in Cochran, Texas for example, families must haul water by car or foot or purchase trucked water at high costs. Families in this city use only 50 to 100 gallons of water per month for whole households of up to 8 people while the average American uses 88 gallons of water per day. It is estimated that 2 million Americans still don’t have access to clean drinking water and more than 44,000,000 million Americans are served by water systems which violate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safe Drinking Water Act. Overall, I just wanted to bring attention to the fact that sometimes in the global health space we neglect the vulnerable populations in our own communities and distance ourselves from global issues by getting stuck in the mindset that these issues only happen thousands of miles away across country borders and oceans. 

Throughout my experience being involved with Rice 360 these past 3 years, I learned about how to effectively design for communities with limited resources.  Reading about how we need to be careful of the verbiage we use and the mindset we sometimes take on in the global health field has played a key role in my own approach to the engineering design process and inspired a shift in the role I want to play as a physician working in the global health space.