SJ Saves the Day

January 18, 2008

After my slow progress and a few equipment failures (below is a picture of our currently working generator a few days ago), I was afraid that I would leave Bangladesh with many uncompleted tasks.

But a fellow graduate student, Sarah Jane, arrived two days ago to help me and together we are making good progress. We have been collecting water samples from the rice field and the aquifer so I can determine their chemical composition. Yesterday, Sarah Jane calibrated the water quality probes while I got the infrastructure set up to collect samples. It was a very efficient arrangement. She is shown below during the aquifer sampling standing next to the probes that she calibrated.

Our only hurdle now is the fog that blankets the countryside in the morning, which makes getting an early start to the day a bit dangerous. In the fog, the visibility on the highway in only a few feet. However, this does not seem to stop our driver or the other drivers on the road from driving extremely fast. Below is a picture of the village at the field site in the morning fog.