4th December

4th December

Here is where I plan on copying and pasting from my group’s “Plan of Action” manuscript, because this project has absorbed the majority of my time and sanity since the inception of my experience with Wetskills….

Parasite Police

An Integrated Responsibility Approach to Sustainable Parasite Monitoring in Drinking Water

December 4, 2013

Problem: Giardia and Cryptosporidium, which account for >90% of protozoan infections in humans are resistant to the common forms and dosages of disinfection, have lower infectious dosages than other pathogens (<10¹ log₁₀ CFU^-1), and they often do not correlate with the presence of bacterial indicators which are used as proxies for fecal contamination of water resources.

Solution: Create a poster, presentation, and pitch to local and international policymakers, corporate financiers, and water experts. Hopefully they will understand you, let alone believe in your project.

J

Ok, now for truths. It has been an excellent test in challenging my ego these past few days. Being the one on my team with the most experience and knowledge of our group’s stated case study, I have been doing my best to be a “nice girl”, while allowing others to take the lead, contribute ideas, shoot down my ideas, but then come back to agreeing with my ideas hours later. I’ve never been much of a “group person”, and taking the lead in projects was always my role when forced into such situations. However, I think I am doing better this time around. Being the native English speaker and with the most [educational] experience on my team, I am doing my best to feverishly organize all our words and translate them into coherent ideas; this has been quite taxing, yet interesting.

Ok, now for truer truths. My team is a delight. Working with another Israeli [but not American] girl reminds me of why I generally prefer to work alone in this country full of people, well, not always like me. She is confrontational yet confident, strong-willed, smart, and very creative. She challenges me on many levels. Working with my two other Dutch male colleagues reminds me of why I like to work with the Dutch J. They carefully plan, know how to time matters and move to another subject, are very open, agreeable, focused, hard-working, and intelligent. No matter our challenges, collectively as a group we end up settling on great ideas and work effectively with one another.

My life is full of discovering my limitations and that of other situations and people. I enjoy limiting aspects of life into “boxes”, only because I can then more easily define, quantify, touch, and essentially create a relationship with it. Whether that is a “limited” perspective, I don’t really mind, it keeps me in my claustrophobic comfort zone J

That being said, I have thoroughly enjoyed my “limiting” experience at Wetskills and have learned an immense amount until today. I would like to do it again actually…the practice is quite nice J