Work down here in Chile

Despite popular belief, I am working down here in Chile. We are working very hard actually, and making a lot of progress recently. So here is a long discription of the work I am doing down here in Chile

Step 1: Background

You may or may not know but the world is in a serious sanitation crisis. It’s hard to believe that 2.6 BILLION people (half of the developing world) lack access to even the most basic latrines, and are left only to the great out doors to handle their personal business. This use to not be a problem, our world is amazing at being able to break down people’s leftovers, and what came from the earth can be naturally be returned to the earth BUT thanks to urbanization in the last 200 years more of the world’s population are living in closer and closer proximity. Our earth can not naturally break down that much waste so condensed together. Beside this being a problem due to smell, eye sores and just a hassle to deal with that much crap, the real problem is due to the bacteria and parasites that are found in human fecal matter that are killing thousands DAILY around the world. 3.5 million people die from diarrheal disease every year attributed to poor sanitation and drinking water. This is also the #1 killer for children under 5 years old. Specifically in fecal matter intestinal worms such as Ascaris are extremely resilient and hard to break down, and therefore over 1 billion people are affected by these Ascasris worms right NOW.

These numbers are hard for us to process, but after visiting Mungoa-goa, a village in Cameron Africa and meeting people who spend their whole lives drinking water from the stream that other people poop in and seeing their pain and suffering, after seeing so many little beautiful children constantly coughing, throwing up and seeing the de-hydration from so much diarrhea, I became deeply connected to this sanitation crisis. This past year while working in Atlanta for Georgia Tech Research Institute I got to work on a Solar Latrine project. Basically, and idea was given us to use the heat from the sun to heat human fecal matter hot enough to kill off everything in, even these extremely resistant intestinal worm eggs called Ascaris. We developed some prototypes and got to present in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian where we took home first place.

Step 2: Start up Chile

The Chilean Government is looking for more and more ways to make Chile a 1^st world country, to develop every part of the country, to connect it to the world and show everyone that they are different from other countries in South American. And they are doing some incredible programs to reach that goal. The Start-Up Chile program is designed to increase business, specifically international business, and foster an entrepreneurship culture here in Chile (the Silicon Valley idea). So they have invited the world community to come start business here in Chile, offering a $40,000 grant to get the business started as well as plenty of resources, mentorship and community to start a business. 4 friends and I, all recent grads, applied for the program back in February with the solar latrine idea. We knew that for the Solar Latrine idea to go anywhere, we needed to break apart from the university and try some real field testing, and, we got in. We started a company called Sanivation (check us at Sanivation.com), Sanivation is “innovation in sanitation” (get it? ha), our goal is to provide novel solutions for the world’s sanitation crisis. Awesome.

Step 3: Moving to Chile

July 12^th all 5 of us said goodbye to the US, not sure of when we would be back, and headed down to Santiago Chile. We quickly found an apt. to live in and were amazing how fast Chile became home. The first couple months were spent really figuring out the world sanitation needs. We spent a lot of time reaching out to people around the world learning from them, we read a million papers, traveled to many places in Chile to see and understand the range of sanitation here. We needed to become sanitation experts. At this time we were comparing technology possibilities and possible business models. For me this was the first time that I had to think about how sanitation could be a business, that providing toilets for the poorest of poor could actually make money. Apparently money doesn’t grow on trees, and grants run out- so for anything in this world to be lasting, there has to be lasting money exchange.

That time learning was frustrating because I am a “doing” person, but it was important. I learned a ton about sanitation, what is currently being done, learned a lot about business, and got my mind thinking bigger and more outside of the box. It was end of October when we realized that a personal solar toilet may not work, it’s to expensive, spends too much time just sitting instead of making money. So we turned instead to community sanitation centers. Currently around the world developed cities’ waste is shipped in pipes via water and pumps to some kind of giant treatment center. In the US, our government pays billions of dollars a year to keep the infrastructure and daily operation needed to keep our system running. Most places can not do this. Way to expensive, way too much expertise required, far too much infrastructure needed. So what do they do? Well most slums in the world have low income workers come and manually remove fecal matter from a holding tank with shovels and carry the family’s shit away and dump it where ever it is convenient for them. Out of site out of mind. Gross, I know.

To battle this many NGOs are creating better toilets, better ways to store the waste so it is better contained and helping to set up easy ways to collect and transport the fecal matter. But then where do they put it? Most don’t know what to do with it. The idea of biogas is getting more and more popular but it has tons of problems and requires high expertise with minimal return on investment. That’s where our community solar treatment center comes in. We would provide a local, safe, cheap place for fecal matter to be transported to. Then in only a day, the fecal matter is safe to put anywhere, and best to be placed on local farms and used as a safe, organic soil amendment.

Step 4: Proving our design

So, a great idea right? Well we are now proving that it is not an idea, but a working product. So we have designed a parabolic solar collector, lets call it a Shit Cooker, and have been testing it to be sure that it hits high enough temperatures.

Our Current Shit Cooker

Basically how it works is the black cylinder is placed in a toilet and you poop into it. It will have a ventilation pipe for smell, and designed right so it is easy and comfortable for people to use. When full, it is capped and then moved to the sanitation center, placed on one of these parabolic mirrors and in one afternoon, it heats up over 60C and kills off all pathogens, then can be sold as fertilizer. The Diagram below will show the system idea for ya.

So, in order to prove this guy works we have been doing MANY temperature tests using fecal matter from all kinds of animals (easier to collect than humans). We are working with a veterinarian university, and so we go to their zoo, and shovel whatever poop we want, and bring it back to our prototype to load it. So, yes, I have collected everything from dog, to cow to emu poop over the past couple weeks. Yummy. (no that is not dirt in our prototype here to the left)

We also need to prove biologically that this will kill off all the parasites and bacteria. So we have been trying long and hard to somehow get some Ascaris eggs. It is harder that you would think. We found that a cousin of the Ascaris egg (found in humans) is Toxocara, found in dogs, specially is very common in puppy poop. So, Andrew and I got to chase down stray puppies for a while in Santiago collecting their shit. Luckily the dog kennel here on the vet campus got a batch of puppies just when we needed it most and their poop was full of Toxocara eggs! YIPPY! Then we took plenty of other studies in how to isolate these eggs, and developed our own procedure where we now have over 40,000 eggs in our stock solution. This is what our precious eggs look like under our microscope after they have incubated.

Yes, this worm hatches in people's intestines

Now comes the fun part. We are putting these isolated eggs into our own “tea bags”. Basically using a porous latex material that has holes small enough to keep eggs in, but large enough to let most of the environment (air and liquids, and mainly heat) in and out we glue them into little baggies holding our eggs!

These tea bags are then placed in a lot of animal crap and into our prototype. We then “bake” it all. Let the solar concentrated do it work, at the end of the day remove the tea bags, open them up, grab a sample from the inside, make a slide and examine it with the microscope and see if the eggs have all been destroyed. Crazy hun? But kinda fun. And very busy.

Meanwhile, while all the lab work is going on, we are re-designing our prototype, making is better to work with, fixing little details. We are also working with a huge NGO down here, called Techo Para Chile who has been vital for us getting to know slums here in Chile. We have visited many of them around Santiago, and will be working with Techo to design a field prototype and hopefully implement in a slum soon so we can get user feed-back. And not to mention, will get to help out a community badly in need of sanitation reform! So I will update on that soon. There is also a couple other possibilities for installation around chile- but to be honest, we don’t want to stay in Chile. I love it here, but 98% of this country has working sanitation. This isn’t where this project belongs. So we are totally making use of our time down here: working with people in the field, visiting slums, lab work, designing, building AND we also are looking for other opportunities to figure out what is next after Chile. We are talking to many huge sanitation groups around the world, as well as other possible implementation or business grants. The plan is to figure out where we can get money to be, and a real place we can implement and work with and go there in August/ September for field testing. Our biggest opportunities right now are south east Asia and Sub Sahara Africa.

So things are well. I am working hard, despite popular opinion, and we are making great progress.

Christmas in Chile

Christmas was something else down here in Chile. Besides it being summer and super hot, and being away from all my family, there is just not a whole lot of Christmas vibe in Chile. It’s just not that big of deal. Like Christmas fell on a weekend this year, and most the country only got Friday before off, including students. But my little family I have here in Chile decided we would have a great Christmas together. So first was the decorating- Nick and I went down to the largest street market in Santiago and in the heat of summer, drinking smoothies, we pushed through the crowds to purchase the most cheesy Christmas décor you can imagine, including out blue tree and lights that played music and lit up with the music. My mother sent stocking with our names on them, and we purchased a few others for our friends who were joining us on Christmas morning. We all bought silly gifts and filled all the stocking and had a blast creatively wrapping them just like I always did with my family back home. On Christmas morning we had us, plus a few friends from various countries, and a couch surfer from Brazil who landed at 7am on Christmas morning in Santiago. We made our own egg knog (because they don’t have it in Chile) as well as our own home made whiskey hot apple cider (spice thanks to my mother) and of course mimosas. So it was a delicious morning to wake up to. We had everyone come to our house for HUGE brunch and also keeping up with recent family tradition- we had French toast casserole. Presents and stockings were next. Everyone got pool toys and water guns (because it was our first Christmas in the summer), lots of alcohol related gifts, and the traditional socks, underwear and office supplies for everyone. After that we headed to a Christmas pool party/BBQ on a friends apartment roof top. So up 20 floors in the center of Santiago we gathered with about 50 people from all different countries to swim, eat, and hear about Christmases around the world. It was something else working on my tan on Christmas, and the sunset was perfect. And then I went and packed because the next day Katelyn was flying in and we were going adventuring together.

The lost city of Machu Picchu

Oh peru. How to begin to describe one of the best vacations of my life? It was incredible. My best friend from the States got to fly to Peru on her fall break and meet me in Peru as we hiked through the Inka Jungle with some of the most incredible people I have ever met from around the world on our way to the lost city of Machu Picchu. If I had to describe it in one world, I would say unreal. Never had such a perfect combination of adventure, sites, new friends, and soul refreshment combined together… ah, can never thank God enough for that one.

I am late to update, and for that I am sorry. Thank you Anna Barrs for staying on my case about it. It was a few months ago now that Caroline Rhode, one of the best surprises of my life, who I met last year when I moved into live with her and Sarah at Miller’s place in Atlanta last year, took a few extra days off of Fall Break and met me in Lima Peru. She was the first person from home I have seen since I came in July, needles to say we had a lot to catch up on. After living with 4 boys here in Chile and being surrounded by other male entrepreneurs I hadn’t realized how much I missed real girl talk. I flew to Peru a couple days earlier and just hung out with some couch surfers and saw the sites of Lima and met lots of fun people. We picked Caroling up from the airport and it was so sweet to see her again. We took off to find a place to chat and found a ridiculous bar with zebra fur seats but had plenty of pisco sours as we caught up on each others life. By the time we got to where we were staying that night we had already been asked if we were “parajas, ” “partners” in Spanish, 3 times and we gave up trying to explain our relationship and just started answering yes, yes we are a couple.

The next day Caro and I flew to Cusco- and what a flight. Peru is filled with incredible landscapes. This flight was filled with jagged mountains that were such vivid shades of green, a beautiful blue sky and incredible rivers that ran along the valleys… wow! So many colors. I feel like I was drooling most of the trip as I stared out the plane window. When we landed our tour guide and soon to be great friend Jimmy Jhon was waiting for us. Poor Jimmy didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Jimmy is a local there in Cusco, (he is actually Cetchua- the local native people’s real name NOT Inca) and he was just about the throw himself into the lions den, Caro and I spent the entire week messing with Jimmy and laughing mainly at him.

We met up with the couch surfer, Erin, who’s house we would be staying at that night, she took us lunch with her boy friend. And they were great, so welcoming and very sarcastically funny, just the way we like them. Cusco is a beautiful city. All the building and roads are cobblestone, very old with so much character and history built into them. We had a great day touring around and fighting the airlines who had decided to loose Caro’s bag for a few hours.

Then next day Caro and I were starting a 4 day Inca Jungle Trail to Machu Picchu. A lot of people have heard about the Inca Trail, rated one of the best trekking in the WORLD. Well there are actually many “Inca Trails” they are all these trails that the Cechtuas (not Inca, Inca were only the rulers, the emperors of the Cetchuas) people had created leading to their main religious city hidden high in the mountains. The one Inca Trail that people are trying to refer to is the Royal Trail, the one specific trail that only the royal family or priests were aloud to use on their journey to Mach Picchu. So the Inca Jungle Trail follows a few different Inca Trails and parts of the Royal one as it follows rivers and jungles as well as over mountains on the way to the hidden city. The best part about this trip, is that is wasn’t just hiking, every day offered new adventures.

Day 1: We left way supper early and joined a van with a group about 10 people. These 10 people were from all over the world and combined created one of the most incredible group of people to have on an adventure: an Irish couple, Canadian couple, 2 Colombian sisters, an Argentina guy, 2 Brits, a Frenchmen, 3 Eastern Europeans, Caro, myself and our guide Jimmy. The van was laded with mountain bikes for everyone and took us up to about 5,000 meters elevation at the top of many mountains in the area. It was beautiful, rolling hills and valleys everywhere. A lot of people got altitude sickness, and everyone was chewing cocoa leaves to fight off the symptoms. Mountain bikes and helmets were given to everyone ad off we got to go: to bike down through the Peruvian mountains, through amazing scenery, down to 1,800 meters. It was such a great way to soak in the majesty of the views. Faster than walking, but more IN the moment than in a car. And no peddling necessary, just going as fast you wanted down curvy mountain roads. I LOVED it. That evening we stayed in this really small town in the mountains at THE town hostel. We got to play volleyball with all the ladies in village- so much fun. Evening was filled with drinking and hanging out with locals and our group.

Day 2: We woke up real early again and started the day off by white water rafting through the mountains of Peru. Ya, I meant what I wrote. I have white water rafted in many places, but none as beautiful a scenery as this. It was gorgeous. Then we spent the rest of the day hiking an inca trail. Throughout the hike Jimmy would stop and teach us all about Inca History and life. We even got dress up in native clothes, eat tradition food and put on traditional face paint. We hiked through the jungle, over volcanoes and by a huge river. We even got to play with a monkey. It was honetly some of the most incredible views I have ever seen. All along we spent laughing and hanging out with our tour group, they really were such incredible people. We ended the hiking at natural hot spring where you got to relax off the day and hang out, letting the naturally hot spring fed water soak our muscles as we swam around. That night we stayed in a slightly larger town, it even has 1 disco-tech. apparently this is one of the few disco-techs in the world were normal dress is dirty, sweaty hiking apparel. Our whole group went out and spent the night dancing with all the locals having a ball.

Day 3: The next morning was again another early start because well, we had to go zip lining through the Inca Moutains… duh. It was pretty darn cool. The view is incredible. Mountains everywhere, river below, perfect sky. Then we trekked down one of the Inca trails going around the back side of machu pichu mountain. You could see parts of the runes as we hiked, it really helped to peak our excitement for how close we were. That night we stayed in Aguas Calihente. The fairly modern, but beautiful city, that exists only to house tourists who are headed to and from Machu Piccu. Of course we bought plenty of bottles of whine to celebrate our arrival.

Day 4: Day 4 started before 4am. Because to get to Machu Piccu you have to hike up 2000 ancient stairs, and you want to be there before sun rise to get the full effect of the mysteriousness, when it’s void of people, when the mist is just starting to raise and the sun begins to peak over the surrounding mountains, when everything is silent and beautiful. We started hiking up when it was still dark, there was a chill to the air that was quickly forgotten due to the 2,000 stairs, but it was incredible. As we hiked up the sun came out and the clouds disappeared and it was amazing. We got to the top before the gates officially opened, so when they did, we were about the 10^th people in. When one steps into Machu Piccu at sunrise for the first time, it is unreal. You feel your body jump 1,000 years back in time. The ruins are huge, and mostly intact, as the clouds begin to lift you understand for the first time the reason why the Cechuas decided this location for their hidden city.

As cool as Machu Piccu is, the reason for all the hype, the reason thousands daily come here, the reason Machu Piccu is incredible as it is, is really everything around Machu Piccu. How do I begin to describe the landscape. The ruins are placed on a saddle in between 2 tall, very skinny mountains that go straight up from the sides of the ruins. Surrounding the saddle is it an almost straight down drop to the valley where the river has carved its way through all the rock. And around are other, straight up, tall mountains, like pillars, all very green with huge rocks exposed. Some with large tress covered in vines as if hiding other ruins- very Indiana Joes style. Then off in the distance every where you look are giant mountains that go on for forever. Wow. Our guide gave us a tour, explained a lot. And then some of us hiked up the other mountain, Wnapichu- another 2,000 stairs up but TOTALLY worth it, the view from up there was even more incredible to be able to look down on Machu Piccu and see the real size of it.

Then we also hacked over to the sun gate where if you take the Inca Royal trail you actually enter Machu Piccu from there right at sunrise and see Machu Piccu from above- which would be pretty cool.

The evening ended with Mexican food and margaritas and we caught a train back to Cusco and we flew back to Lima the next day. Being with Caroline was by far the best part of the trip. Just soaking it in of how good it was to be with someone who really knew me, and who spoke English. We ended our trip together with Caroline taking me out to the fanciest, most delicious restaurant in Lima. It was a fresh sea food restaurant built out over the water. It was beautiful. And some of the BEST food I have had in my life. What a meal. It was hard to say goodbye to Peru and to Caroline. But defiantly in my top favs vacations ever.