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.

#labwork

My Research

Many of you (but primarily my mom) might be wondering, "so what is Nina actually doing with her time?...What research is she doing exactly?"

This is a good question, and I will do my best to answer.

As you might remember, in my last post I mentioned that I decided to stay in Israel for an additional year, after my Fulbright scholarship is over, to earn my Master's degree in Hydrology. In order to join the Hydrology program, I had to find an adviser who was willing to take on an extra student, in the middle of the semester, with no previous plans on doing so. 

Finding someone to take me under their supervision was relatively hard. All the professors are busy with their current work and they plan each semester accordingly with the current students that they have. 

The reason why I found Shai Arnon (who I had already asked multiple times and he had firmly said NO multiple times) is because one of his students dropped out - a Palestinan student named Ameen who was also a part of my Fulbright research project on EDCs in the water. Shai was out of luck because Ameen was going to do all the water sampling in the West Bank, since there are areas where Israeli's are not allowed to go. This is where my American citizenship stepped in! I am now the student responsible for taking water samples in the West Bank! But I will still be involved in the Israeli water sampling as well.

The Israeli side is my Fulbright research project and the West Bank side is my Master's thesis project.

So what do I do exactly?

After taking the water samples, I bring them to a lab in Tel Aviv run my the Ministry of Health. I will work with a scientist there to separate all the EDCs from each water sample. This process includes special technologies used only in this lab (out of all of Israel), and takes a few hours per sample - adding chemicals, rinsing with water, vacuum filtration through a fibrous disc, etc, etc. After I get all the water separated from the EDCs, I hand the EDC sample to the scientists for analysis. 

Once we get the EDC data back from the scientists, I will look at the data and analyse it for public health issues.

Hope that provides you all with some guidance on what I am doing!!