Science in the Amazon

The boys from the Amazonian orphanage decided to name themselves Los Científicos. The Scientists.

It was a small but monumental achievement for Rick Henrikson and Richard Novak, two Berkeley bioengineering graduate students. The pair cofounded Future Scientist, a tiny but highly motivated aid organization whose mission is to teach science and practical technical skills to young people in rural, developing regions.

MICROSCOPIC FUN: The evening we arrived at the orphanage, we unpacked one of our microscopes. It became an immediate hit as we sat on the river bank and scooped up samples, showing the kids various algae and protozoa. It’s this kid’s first time looking through a microscope.

FUTURE SCIENTIST: A boy from the orphanage uses a pipette to collect water from a swamp for viewing under the microscope. From the time we unpacked the first microscope, the boys were fascinated with what they could see. We hoped to cultivate this fascination and show that science was cool, that it would make a good career. But mostly that scientific knowledge would lead to a better life.

OUR GROUP, THE CHICAS: Posing in the Peruvian village of Mazan are (from left) Frances Bell, an engineer at Bechtel Corp.; Jana Broadhurst, a medical student at UCSF; Jamie Liu, a software engineer at IBM; Sisi Chen, a bioengineering graduate student; and Mei Gao, a public health graduate student. We were visiting the village to drop off medical supplies at the local clinic. The supplies were donated through UCSF Remedy.

OUR GROUP, THE CHICOS: From left, Tyson Kim, Gautham Venugopalan, me, Rick Henrikson, and Frankie Myers, all bioengineering graduate students, mug for the camera. Bob Pollard, a high school science teacher, flew in a few days later to help with solar panel installation and science lessons.

MORNING IN THE MARKET: Mazan’s square and port bustle with activity. Boats loaded dangerously full of plantain bunches arrived to transfer their cargo, which was bound for Iquitos, the biggest city in the Peruvian Amazon. At one point, a man came along and tried to sell us his sloth. We declined.

RIVER TRAVEL: A guide and his banana boats ferry us up the Mazan River, a tributary of the Amazon, to several remote communities accessible only by boat. The town of Mazan is visible in the background.

TYPICAL SCENE: Palm-thatched huts on stilts line the banks of the river as we make our way upstream to the boys’ orphanage in Puerto Alegría. Most people who live in the Peruvian Amazon earn their living as fishermen or farmers; the average income is five dollars a day.

SWIMMING POOL AND WASHING MACHINE: With no running water, women wash clothes in the river while their children swim nearby. At one point, Rick observed people collecting water next to a latrine built over the river. Water-borne illnesses are a leading source of morbidity here. According to the World Health Organization, a child from rural Peru is twice as likely to die before age five as a child from Peru’s urban areas. So many of our projects focused on water-borne illnesses.

OUR DESTINATION: A view of the Puerto Alegría town center, with several school buildings in the center. In some ways, the people here don’t require outside help. “Their knowledge of local medicinal plants is amazing,” Rick observed later. “They know what each plant can do and are very self-sufficient that way. It’s not that the community lacks resources; it’s that, for some of those resources, no one has the knowledge to use them effectively.” One example is the Amazon itself, with its generous, but polluted water supply.

OUR HOTEL ROOM: Most of our team decided to sleep in hammocks in this maloca, a local type of gazebo, by the river. After some trial and error, we figured out the most efficient way to hang up the hammocks so they wouldn’t give way when we slept in them.

EVERY MORNING: At the Casa Girasoles Orphanage, the boys perform chores like sweeping leaves from the lawn before eating breakfast and walking to the nearby school.

CAREFUL SETUP: Here, Tyson prepares for one of the more advanced optics lessons in which the kids assembled a simple microscope using magnifying lenses and a homemade optical rail. Of the many strategies employed by global aid organizations, outreach in the form of a basic science education is one of the most underutilized.

TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE: Tyson demonstrates how two lenses can be combined for greater magnification.

RAPT AUDIENCE: Boys listen as Tyson and Gautham demonstrate how lenses function and how they can be used in microscopes. We used the microscopes to show how water can be filtered to remove many disease-causing germs. This first lesson of our trip was a huge success.

TEACHER AND STUDENTS: Gautham helps the boys make their own microscope mounts during the first science lesson in microscopy. By linking human behavior and sickness with microorganisms under a microscope and teaching filtration techniques, we helped fill in educational gaps.

AN EYE FOR SCIENCE: Boys look at their water samples through the microscope. They kept discovering new bugs and asking us what they were. (We didn’t know!) One day, these boys might become scientists or engineers. Or inventors, tinkerers, healers, builders, entrepreneurs, mechanics, business owners or teachers in their community.

SOLAR LESSON: I’m showing how solar panels turn light into electricity as part of a larger demonstration on how a solar panel array, which we had brought with us and later installed, will provide power for the orphanage. During our stay in Puerto Alegría, we frequently fielded questions from both the kids and the adults in the community about solar power and its applications.

SUN, THEN SONG: We were fortunate to obtain a small grant from the Clinton Global Initiative that paid for supplies such as small solar power teaching kits. Here the boys try out the panels from the kit, which they had wired to a music-playing device.

CREATIVE CARPENTRY: Installing solar panels on one of the school roofs proved to be more challenging than we expected. Aside from finding the appropriate hardware and tools, we encountered such obstacles as bat colonies in the attic and the fragility of the ladder that we used to climb to the roof.

COOL PLAY: Jamie splashes in the river during a break after lunch. The river provided a much-needed refresher from the heat and humidity.

UPON CLOSER INSPECTION: When we weren’t teaching, we got to know the kids. Here a four-year old orphan named Luis plays dentist with Rick.

JUNGLE MUSIC: Frankie (right) and Eduardo, an orphanage caretaker, jam for us in an impromptu concert accompanied by frogs, crickets and other rainforest sounds. Light at night was a luxury. Electricity in the area is supplied by generators, but the gasoline to power them is expensive for the villagers and has to be shipped in, so there was electricity for only an hour or two, if at all.

NOURISHMENT FOR THE BODY AND MIND: Tyson and the boys from the orphanage wait for dinner to be served. Starches such as rice, plantains and potatoes form the staple of most meals there. Overall, our first trip to the Amazon was a success. We left feeling more committed than ever to our mission: scientific knowledge should be available to everyone, and armed with it, these young people, regardless of their circumstances, can build a better future.

Last August, Novak, Henrikson and nine other Future Scientists traveled to Peru for their first pilot project: teaching a two-week crash course on pathogenic microorganisms, disease transmission, optics and solar-powered electricity to schoolchildren living along the Amazon River.

“We don’t want to do charity,” Novak, 24, explains. “The problem with many global aid organizations is that they’re product based. They donate resources, but the resources eventually run out. The large piece of equipment breaks and no one knows how to repair it. We’re taking a different approach.”

Arriving by boat, the Berkeley visitors proffered simple science lessons of a practical nature, purely optional. Thirty children from the Casa Girasoles Orphanage and community of Puerto Alegría showed up to their informal school.

Together, teachers and students collected water near the village and viewed it under microscopes schlepped from California. They identified invisible organisms that make people sick, talked about water pollution and practiced simple filtration techniques. They examined the microscopes themselves, learned how they’re built, how to work them and what useful things they reveal. (The microscopes and other equipment were later given to the community school.) The children played with magnifying glasses and learned the basics of optics.

Next, the teachers brought out small, solar panel kits to collect solar energy. The group made solar-powered radios, exploring electromagnetic waves and radio transmission. In this part of the world, with no reliable electricity, they soldered wire and assembled electrical components, then danced to the music gleaned from the airwaves. Finally, the children formed teams to compete in a solar oven–building contest.

To measure their work, the Berkeley teachers surveyed the children before and after the lessons; their results showed the material was sticking. “They were excited about what they were learning,” Novak reports. The nascent organization hopes to empower children with enough practical know-how so that, 10 years from now, these young adults can address their community’s needs—good health, electricity, sanitation, jobs—with solutions of their own.

Henrikson, 26, first saw a need for outreach to rural areas when he volunteered for a community health care organization in the Dominican Republic. Henrikson, who has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from MIT, became a reluctant object of admiration among the people he met there. “They saw the benefit of a science education, and I was moved to do something that would support that need,” he says.

When he arrived at Berkeley, Henrikson met Novak, a fellow first-year graduate student in bioengineering with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Emory University. Between high school and college, Novak had worked at a research station deep in the Amazon. He watched as malaria sickened nearly half the local population and observed firsthand the consequences of ignorance about concepts as simple as disease transmission. Novak and Henrikson became roommates and spent long hours discussing ideas for how to help.

In the meantime, they volunteered for a science outreach program to Bay Area schools and met bioengineers similarly motivated: Tyson Kim, Sisi Chen, Frankie Myers, Gautham Venugopalan — eight graduate students in all — plus two professional engineers and a high school science teacher. Someone knew someone who had a contact at the Casa Girasoles Orphanage in Peru, and plans coalesced.

In January 2009, Future Scientist was born. Later, the group won funding from the Clinton Global Initiative and other donors, enough to buy equipment for their first batch of science lessons. Airfare to Peru and other travel expenses would come out of members’ own pockets.

A shoestring budget didn’t prevent the travelers from making the most of their time in the Amazon. When they weren’t teaching lessons, the group met with local teachers and health care workers to survey people’s needs, an important part of Future Scientist’s collaborative approach.

Back in Berkeley, the group is fundraising and writing a business plan while refining its curriculum and developing new hands-on science lessons. The next step is to recruit more volunteers to teach in the Amazon and continue the work launched last August.

Two members of Future Scientist returned to the Amazon last month to launch a new project (and blog about it). They’re installing a customized biogas digester system and teaching the villagers how to run it, hoping to spark a cottage industry there. Digesters, already employed in many parts of the developing world, are airtight tanks that convert farm scraps, human waste and organic matter into methane-based cooking fuel and nitrogen-rich fertilizer through anaerobic digestion. It’s a low-cost and sustainable way to improve sanitation and kill pathogens. Simple science sustaining life in the rainforest.