5th December, Pre-presentations and Sinterklaas, Joeri Prins

5th December, Pre-presentations and Sinterklaas, Joeri Prins

It was already the 9th day of the Wetskills program, the day for the pre-presentations of each group. After a few mornings in a row of waking up at 5:30 am to go swimming on campus, this time I started at 8:00 am with breakfast.

Today we had to present a poster and a pitch (selling your product in less than 2 minutes). It was meant as a draft in order for the teams to get some feedback from the others as well as the study case clients. The main reason for this to present it to your case owners and to improve your poster. The teams received a lot of pros and cons from which they could work on.

After the presentations, some teams had time to discuss their case with their client, which also helped to improve their ideas. Now what was left, was to edit each poster and input the recommendations from everyone. Working on this took the rest of the day.

Because it is December 5^th, which is in the Netherlands a typical day for celebrating Sinterklaas, we also celebrated it in Israel. First of all, everyone had to bring a present that was ultimately given to another.  The Dutch participants also brought with them some food we eat at Sinterklaas, Kruidnoten/Pepernoten. We started with the songs we usually sing in the Netherlands. After a lot of songs, we began a game so that everyone can choose and swap presents. Because of the nature of the game, the presents go mainly to the left or to the right.

After the celebration, some participants went to the campus bar, while others finished up on the poster that needed to be printed out in the morning. My group was one of them, but we treated ourselves to a trip to the top of Mt. Carmel for a view of the night skyline of Haifa.

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

4th December, Emily Tran

4th December, Emily Tran

Working today with the group was long but very interesting. Over the course of the past few days, I've learned a lot about not only water resource management but about myself as an American and as an Israeli representitive in the program. It's a strange feeling being considered an “Israeli” by the Wetskills program, as these past six months I have been in the country, my American-ness has been put into intense contrast to the Israelis that surround me. Now that I am working with students studying the same concepts from other parts of the world, I am realizing just how much this culture has rubbed off on me. I find myself loving the black coffee served during the coffee breaks which I have yet to see a Dutch student drinking, and joyfully explaining all the little intricacies of Israeli culture that were foreign to me only 6 months ago. I've enjoyed locating a site for our project and actually having a picture in my head of where we are working and how the daily life there contributes to the success of the project. 

At the same time, it's easy to see how being somewhat “from” this country can also be in the way of coming up with innovative solutions to local problems, as my first thoughts about how to deal with a certain situation are the ones that have been taught to me. I spent so much time studying case studies at first- what has been done and how can we apply that to our solution. That's where the Dutch students have been amazingly helpful- they don't know where the water treatment plants are, where the tourists go or what the local species of trees are. They do know what works in other countries- what makes a project self-sustainable and brings in income rather than just serving the purpose of planting a forest for the sake of a forest existing.

In the end I've started to understand collaboration in the scientific community a bit better. Normally we all work on our own projects, write our own theses, take a few pointers from our advisors and go on our own way, but it's been a good opportunity to try something different. Understanding where we are from and how our backgrounds present us with strengths and weaknesses in the work that we do is often a hard thing to remember, and occasionally we all need a bit of a reminder of how we know the things that we know to figure out a solution to a problem. Are we just saying something because that's what we have always been told, or are we truly something up with something unique?

3th December, Discussing plan of action, Giel Hakman

3th December, Discussing plan of action, Giel Hakman

Once upon a time on a sunny Wednesday in Israel, a special delegation that joined the Wetskills-
Israel program 2013, had to wake up early. Laboriously, this delegation opened their eyes and
realized that this day the conceptual plan of action had to be discussed with three supervisors: Johan,
Janneke and Professor Eran. The day started with a delicious breakfast without the poisoned apple
from the evil queen in Snow White. Group 4 had a field trip to a nearby site of their client and kicked
off the discussion with them. Throughout the day the supervisors went to each group and asked
every group to judge their own plan of action. On innovation, feasibility, economic attractiveness
and social and environmental context. After dinner a group of eight Dutch students and a special
Israeli student that studies at the Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, who will remain anonymous,
in the most awesome hippie car in the world to a waterpipe, narghile, arghila, qalyān, hooka, shisha
or however you want to call it bar in Masada, a neighborhood in Haifa. After a late night and a lot of
good stories, this love group was very tired, went home to their little beds and dreamed about sugar
and spice and everything nice.

1st December, Kick off and an introduction of the cases, Menno Brouwer

1st December, Kick off and an introduction of the cases, Menno Brouwer

This Sunday was a great gathering of all the participants, and experts. Today the working part of the program started. After a delicious breakfast served by the university everybody and everything was introduced. People would tell their name and background. The increasing significance water scarcity in both Israel and the world was stressed by Professor Avi Shaviv. He is the director of the Grand water research institute at the Technion in Haifa. This is the place where practically all of the work is going to take place. And then finally that thing happened where most of us had been waiting for: the study cases got explained and the teams were being formed.

The four cases are briefly as follows:

1.       Cryptosporidum and Giardia in the Catchment Area of the Sea of Galilee (Mekorot) 
2.       Water Pipes Network for Reused Sewage and Wastewater (Water and Sanitation Corporation in Shfaram Area) 
3.       Atmospheric water extraction – passive & active (Technion) 
4.       Irrigation support for future forests (KKL-JNF)

After the cookies and coffee, as Johan likes to call it, the pressure cooker was heated up. The teams got together and had a short time to get acquainted with each other and with the case study.  Before we really felt ready for it the expert speed date sessions started. 7 expert with a wide variety in water background could be interviewed.  Since experts tend to know a lot, 10 minutes of talking per expert seemed way to short. But hé, that’s what a speed date is like.

Full with ideas and questions we went for a nice lunch. Some people don’t say you shouldn’t talk about work during your breaks, but we were too excited for that. After lunch we could clear up our minds a bit and restate our goals, decide how far we could go with thinking outside of the box (we were already thinking outside of the assignment). This part of the day was also a good opportunity to get to know your fellow team members a bit better.

We wrapped the day up (ended) with a small game together with all students. Each person would choose one of the many pictures that were put on the ground for the sake of this game. The picture was meant to be like a metaphor for your personality and your motivation to participate in Wetskills. Not very surprisingly any more everyone was given time to tell that story to the rest of the group. This was a nice and relaxed way to end the day, but more important to connect a bit better to persons outside of your team.

30th November, Shabbat, Akko, Ivar Lokhorst

30th November, Shabbat, Akko, Ivar Lokhorst

The fourth official day of the Wetskills program, and our free day for its Shabbat. Shabbat is the weekly day of for the Jewish, and therefore nearly the entire city is shut down. Shops close, busses are out of order and working is really not done. Today everyone was able to do whatever he wanted, but most of us went to Akko, a harbour village close to Haifa.

At 10 am seven of us left for Akko, and three decided to stay in the area. Because it’s Shabbat most busses were out of order, and only the Arabic ones could bring us to Akko. After sunbathing at the bus stop for half an hour the bus finally appeared and we headed off to downtown Haifa where we could switch to a minibus that could take us to Akko. The minibus drives a fixed route, but it’s possible to hop on and off wherever you want. Whenever we hop off we realise Akko is way larger than expected and that we might probably not have seen all of it before half past two.

We started with an original Turkish coffee at the cosiest place in town, an original style coffee house, with pillows all over the place. The first people were already enjoying their nagila, which is the Hebrew word for shisha. Unfortunately we all had to agree we did not like the coffee, both due to a large amount of sugar and due to the cardamom on the bottom that some of us accidently drink. The resulting faces on the other hand were fabulous. After a short walk through the souq (a market) we went to the Al-Djazzar mosque. The Al-Djazzar mosque was an oasis of peace and for some of us had never visited a mosque before it was a quite special experience. The Citadel unfortunately only sold combination tickets for several of the touristic attractions and since we had little time to visit them both we decide not to enter it. The gardens surrounding the citadel were wonderful though. Due to the gigantic rainforest-like trees the entire area was covered in shadow and cool, which was quite pleasant after a hot morning.

Lunch time: The lunches here in Israel remain an interesting experience, though the Israeli all have a normal posture, the little restaurants keep feeding us so much we are almost exploding. After enjoying pine Humus, falafel, and other typical dishes accompanied with loads of pita we continued our way through the bazaar. The bazaar sells products of all different kinds, ranging from fish to authentic music instruments and tourist hats. The bazaar ended at the harbour where a lot of (poorly maintained) ships are situated. After the harbour visit, we split up and half of the group went back to Haifa. The other half actually run into a protest against the Israeli plan to move the Bedouins into towns, but luckily they did not have any serious trouble, and it was actually an exciting story.

Once everyone got back to the guesthouse we went for dinner. We found a small restaurant close to the campus which sold typical Israeli dishes like “pasta Galilea”. Here we truly discovered the extraordinary eating skills of one of our group members, who seems to be never satisfied, but his/her name will not be mentioned.

 At the end of the very relaxed day most of us went to bed early because tomorrow the program’s getting more serious and we will start working on the different case studies.