Research Bugs

                We finally started our research today. We didn’t really know what exactly we were doing but we just needed to start so we knew what we didn’t know and how to fix it but we also had to start talking to some families and getting information from them for Dr. Johnston. So we split up. Emily and Whitney went to talk to the families with a couple of translators while John and I started getting the sweet potatoes ready to dry. There was a bit of scrambling around to try to get everything ready in the morning but somehow everything got done well enough.

                For our research we are looking at different ways to treat sweet potato slices before drying them to help them not brown, dry faster, rehydrate better and stuff like that. We are also comparing Dr. Steele’s solar dryer to traditional air drying on a drying mat. The treatments we are looking at this week are soaking in water, soaking in salt brine, soaking in brine with salt and brown sugar, another one with white sugar instead of brown sugar and blanching. Emily and Whitney finished before we did so they helped us finish pretreatments and clean out the solar dryer so we could put stuff in it. The solar dryer is a cool concept but the one we have here is not all that impressive so we are going to see if we can just make it a little bit better. Fixing racks and stuff like that. Basically we’re just seeing if the solar dryer is worth the investment because if it’s not as good as air drying, nobody is going to want to use it.

                It took half the day to get all of the samples drying and we were all a little tired after that. Then we finally could check our emails and such from the weekend. It was a pretty lazy afternoon which was ok because we were all a little tired.

                After dinner, we had to take the water activity of our potatoes again to see how they were drying and it took an hour and a half. Emily, Whitney and I were I a spare room in the boy’s hostel and it was dark so the bugs came in and were annoying. I do ok with most bugs now but there this one kind of bug that’s big, fat, ugly and stupid that I can’t stand! It flies around and gets really close to you and runs into stuff and you can hear it run into the wall it sounds like a marble hitting the wall, the worst part is that this bug will fly around in circles up near the light and then it’ll just stop flying and like dive bomb you. Occasionally they get in and just fly around and I was doing ok with it. As long as he was leaving me alone I could ignore him but then he landed on me and I just couldn’t take it and I freaked out and it all just went from caution to pandemonium. After I screamed and jumped around to get him off, Emily and I left the room and Whitney grabbed the nearest weapon, a plastic spoon, to take care of him. Whitney just has this way with bugs, they now that she’s just trying to take them back outside. Anyway she eventually knocked him down and was able to get him outside and we all calmed back down and finished up what we were doing, packed up and went to our hostel. Yeah, weird day and now I’m the girl that flipped out about the bug. At least we don’t have them in the US or I would die!