Research, Africa Edition

This week, we started doing our research on solar drying. My Honors thesis has two parts to it: a technical part and a more sociological part. Right now, we’re working on the technical part. 

Here’s the long and short of the technical part: one of the food science professors has developed a solar dryer for use in communities in developing countries. We’re evaluating why this solar dryer is even important. Why it would be worth it for developing communities to make the investment in a solar dryer, when air-drying might seem to work perfectly well. We’re drying various Vitamin A-rich vegetables (Malawians are often deficient in Vitamin A) and are measuring drying rates, water activity, moisture loss, and the like. We’ll also be doing some sensory research here on final product. We’re taking samples back with us to BYU to do some nutrient and color analysis, as well as hopefully getting some moisture sorption isotherms. We’re doing several different brine pretreatments and are comparing samples from the different pretreatments as well as making a comparison between the solar-dried product versus the air-dried product.

This week, we did a practice run with sweet potatoes.

It was a blatant reminder that this is a third-world country.

We take so many things for granted in the labs at BYU. Little things. Things like rubber gloves, a scale that goes to the hundredth of a gram. Clean surfaces. Sharp knives, scientific equipment. Space.

I think it all came to a head as Renee, Whitney, and I sat in an empty bedroom in a hostel at 8:00 at night, trying to take water activity of all the samples.

The knives and peeler we had bought in Lilongwe had been complete and utter crap. So we had spent the day cutting and peeling sweet potatoes with a three-inch pocket knife on a square foot space that we’d cleared on a table in the cooking area (hopefully it was clean?). No mandoline or slicer, so we did our best with the pocket knife and ruler we jacked from an office to make even 5mm slices. To put it generously, we were mildly successful. We tried to boil water on an electric hot plate that refused to get hot enough. We ran out of sugar, and there was no store to get more. The solar dryer’s chimney fell off, the door wouldn’t close all the way, and some of the zip ties broke on the drying racks. We tried to fix it, but we didn’t have tools. Our scale only goes to the nearest gram, and somehow, we were supposed to calculate total moisture loss from that. We had to move our solar operation due to our original location getting overtaken by goats trying to graze on our front lawn (it’s more of a sand space with the occasional weed, dumb goats). Dogs ate some of our air-drying samples anyways.

The day had been a comical disaster.

So it was 8:00, we needed to take water activity, and the kitchen we had used earlier was locked.

We hijacked an empty room that we’d placed the air-drying samples in for the night.

We had nothing to cut the samples on. Nothing to clean the area with. So we cut sweet potato slices with the pocket knife on a dirty bed frame, while insects buzzed above us, constantly hitting the fluorescent lightbulb before they would divebomb us.

Renee started laughing and looked at me, “Emily, what are we doing?”

And I said, “I don’t know,” because here we were, trying to do scientific research, and this was perhaps the least science-y I had ever felt. Nothing would be accurate, and nothing would be precise. How was this supposed to be scientific when we had nothing remotely scientific to work with?

We’ve refined our protocol now. It’s much better, and our data should be much more accurate next week. It is such a good thing we did a practice run. I don’t know why I thought it would go smoothly, when research rarely turns out the first time, even in a well-equipped lab.

I hope I don’t seem like I’m complaining. Quite frankly, doing research in Africa is frustrating at times. It’s comical, funny. It’s also great and rewarding.

I am rather enjoying the ingenuity and creativity that comes out of working on a project like this. I like the challenge. I like the subject matter. I couldn’t have asked to be here with a better group of fellow food science interns. They are truly great, and ever so knowledgeable and helpful. Everybody has such different strengths. In terms of this project, I am extremely eager to work with them to explore ways to get around the obstacles here in order to get good data.

This research. It excites me. It really does.

Here are a couple photos of the area around where I live at SAFI. 

This is just a little bit down on the road I live on in Mtalimanja.

Malawi is such a beautiful place.