February Water Sampling Campaign

A day in the life of water sampling:

• 5:30 or 6am wake up!
• Drive from Sde Boker up to Beit Jalla (near Jerusalem, but in the West Bank)
• Meet up with Nader, a Palestinian scientist that I am working with.
• Transfer all of my equipment from my rental car into Nader's car and we are off! 
• Nader brings with him someone to be my assistant - anyone he can find, but more recently a Palestinian undergrad student from Bethlehem University named Wa'd. Sometimes my advisor Alon Tal comes, but because he has Israeli citizenship, he is not allowed in Area A, so sometimes he is not allowed to come. 

• Nader drives us to the different sampling sites - all of my sites are places where wastewater flows freely in the West Bank. Sewage water. Out in the open. Gross. But I'm totally OK with it now. Haha. I stay safe, gloves, waders, or boots, whatever I need to prevent contracting dysentery. So far so good ;)

• Once I finish taking a few water samples (usually 3 or sometimes 4 in a day), then I say goodbye to Nader and drive the samples to Tel Aviv to store in a fridge at the Ministry of Health's Water Chemistry Lab.

A day in the life of the lab:

• Sleep at someone's house in Tel Aviv (usually someone from Fulbright, or more recently also a friend I reconnected with from Year Course).
• Get to the lab around 8am.
• Filter my samples through microfiber glass filter discs. This takes a long time because my samples are usually extremely dirty since most of it is raw sewage. 

• Flush the sample through a very expensive disc that collects all the EDCs when the water is pushed through it. This can take anywhere from two hours to six hours per sample - oy vey! So many hours on my feet waiting!

• Use chemical washes to release the EDCs from the disc and collect the released liquid by placing a catchment vile underneath. 
• Run the chemical/EDC mixture through a salt compound to absorb any left over water. Therefore any liquid that goes through is EDC liquid and is no longer bonded to water molecules.

• Evaporate the sample using a warm bath and nitrogen gas environment until only 1ml of concentrated solution is left.

Yes, that is right, you heard me - ONE MILILITER!!!! I take a 4 Liter sample in the field to produce just one tiny itty bitty mililiter of EDC concentrate.