Made In China - Part 1

Temporarily living the life of a Chinese factory worker, my first week in China has been one filled with hard, rewarding work that will directly give clean water to people. I have been happy to help solve some problems with practical engineering, and have also learned much. At the end of the week, I became ill and had no spirit to write. Now that I am alive again, and able to get around the Great Firewall of China using a VPN, here is my first post since leaving Taiwan.

My second placement began in the city of Kunming in Yunnan Province, located in the central south of China bordering Vietnam, Laos, and Burma, near Thailand. I had a direct flight from Taipei, and before boarding the plane I noticed immense differences between the Chinese mainlanders and the Chinese of Taiwan. The mainlanders are sloppier in their dress and posture. The volume of their speech is magnitudes louder. Instead of forming lines, they form squeezing masses with necks craning, each trying to get ahead of his neighbor. Nobody gets upset at this. On the plane, it is loud and chaotic, with everyone talking, pointing, and moving past one another. I have noticed behavior like this on previous trips to China, but never to this extreme. I have heard somebody compare this part of China to backwoods Arkansas (no offense to any of my readers living in, having lived in, or planning to live in backwoods Arkansas). It is quite a spectacle; I regret not taking a video to show you.

 

Our village of Fu Shan Cun in the Valley near Kunming

Shortly after arriving in the city of Kunming, I met up with a man named Mok, a social worker who was once a journalist for the Communist party until he realized it was no form of journalism if everything he wrote was cut or changed to the party’s liking. He works for Derek, a Trojan who runs Resource Development Partners International (RDPI), the NGO I will be working with. Mok took me to a nearby village in a valley to the Ceramic Water Filter Factory (CWFF), where I will be staying until another project kicks off. In rural areas of Yunnan, and many places around the world, water gets contaminated with fecal material when manure is used as fertilizer at an elevation above a water source. The result of this pollution is diarrhea and other health problems. The infant mortality rate here is high, though it goes underreported by the state-run media. Imagine a child or infant who gets diarrhea from drinking water because his immune system isn't strong enough to fight off the bacteria. Becoming dehydrated, the only thing to do is to drink more of the contaminated water. So the people here need a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to use solution.
 
At the CWFF, the main goal is to make simple water filters out of a mixture of clay and rice husks, shaped like large flower pots. It is a low-tech, low-cost method and product that eventually can be run by the locals. These filters require no power, no replacement cartridges, can be used with both rain and surface water, are long lasting, and easy to use. They do not, however, remove heavy metals from water, and cannot handle large quantities of water in a short period of time. The pots are fired in the kiln, and as the clay hardens, the rice husks burn away, leaving small pores. The pores are large enough to let water molecules through, but small enough to block microorganisms from passing. Each pot that passes testing is lined with a small amount of silver nitrate for good measure, and then inserted into a plastic bucket with a lid and a spout (before it was known that it prevented bacteria from reproducing, silver had long been known to prevent illness – it is the reason we use silverware). Completed filters are sold to rural families for $100 RMB (about $15 USD). One filter is enough for one family, and it can remove 99.88% of water borne disease agents and will last many years until broken accidentally. They are sold, not given out freely, mainly because a family that spends its hard-earned money will value what they’ve bought. Selling does allow for some money to come back to the factory, though it has not come close to breaking even.
 

Peter, with completed filter

The five workers here are all about my age and come from local villages. Only one has a college education, a couple never made it to high school. They are remarkably good spirited, and go about their work diligently and carefully. I have noticed that people of Kunming can be playful, have a good sense of humor, and often seem to be smiling to themselves (not in a creepy way, but in a pleasant way). The man running the factory is Peter, a Californian who speaks decent Mandarin and is into math, programming, and sci-fi. Don’t let his nerd-side fool you, as he is one of the most capable people I’ve met, and can handle much physical labor, week in and week out. I grew up in American suburbia, spent my college years on UCLA’s well manicured campus, and then worked a white-collar job in various office buildings. So unless you count all those hours spent training in the pool, I have never known the meaning of hard, physical work. That all changed this week and I loved it.
 

The first day, I shoveled rocks into a hammer mill all afternoon long, filling a bin full of clay powder. Then the area was swept clean. The next morning, clay powder, rice husks, and water were all carefully measured into buckets, and thrown into the mixing machine. The ratio depended on the wetness of the powder, determined by weighing, heating, and then weighing again to see how much water had evaporated. The coarse mixture that came out of the mixer was separated into 8-kilogram clumps, which were pounded into blocks on a canvas, then bagged and stored. This was repeated for many batches, enough for 48 blocks, which took us all morning. Then the area was swept clean. Another morning was spent molding the 48 blocks into 48 pots, which were then hand smoothed, inside and out, with help from a single-speed slow-turning potter’s wheel. Numbers were stamped onto the pots and they were stored in the drying chambers. Then the area was swept clean. As all this was going on, previous batches were being dried, fired, and tested. During some downtime, I took up my old love of ceramics and made a wheel thrown pot (see first picture in post). It's something I've wanted to go back to ever since high school, but never got the chance.

(continued in Part 2)