Ventilator from old car parts? Afghan girls pursue prototype
Amid virus gloom, glimpses of human decency and good works
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 20, (AP): On most mornings, Somaya Farooqi and four other teenage girls pile into her dad’s car and head to a mechanic’s workshop. They use back roads to skirt police checkpoints set up to enforce a lockdown in their city of Herat, one of Afghanistan’s hot spots of the coronavirus pandemic.
The members of Afghanistan’s prize-winning girls’ robotics team say they’re on a live-saving mission - to build a ventilator from used car parts and help their war-stricken country battle the virus.
“If we even save one life with our device, we will be proud,” said Farooqi, 17.
Their pursuit is particularly remarkable in conservative Afghanistan. Only a generation ago, during the rule of the Islamic fundamentalist Taleban in the late 1990s, girls weren’t allowed to go to school. Farooqi’s mother was pulled from school in third grade.
After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, girls returned to schools, but gaining equal rights remains a struggle. Farooqi is undaunted. “We are the new generation,” she said in a phone interview. “We fight and work for people. Girl and boy, it does not matter anymore.”
Afghanistan faces the pandemic nearly empty-handed. It has only 400 ventilators for a population of more than 36.6 million. So far, it has reported just over 900 coronavirus cases, including 30 deaths, but the actual number is suspected to be much higher since test kits are in short supply.
The Herat province in western Afghanistan is one of the nation’s hot spots because of proximity to Iran, the region’s epicenter of the outbreak.
This has spurred Farooqi and her team members, ages 14 to 17, to help come up with a solution.
On a typical morning, Farooqi’s father collects the girls from their homes and drives them to the team’s office in Herat, zigzagging through side streets to skirt checkpoints. From there, another car takes them to a mechanic’s workshop on the outskirts of the city.
In Herat, residents are only permitted to leave their homes for urgent needs. The robotics team has a limited number of special permits for cars.
So far, Farooqi’s father hasn’t been able to get one, but the girls are in a hurry. “We are concerned about security driving out of the city but there is no other option, we have to try to save people’s life,” Farooqi said.
At the workshop, the team is experimenting with two different designs, including an open-source blueprint from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The parts being used include the motor of a Toyota windshield wiper, batteries and sets of bag valve masks, or manual oxygen pumps. A group of mechanics helps them build the frame of a ventilator.
Daniela Rus, a professor at MIT, welcomed the team’s initiative to develop the prototype. “It will be excellent to see it tested and locally produced,” she said.
Tech entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who founded the team and raises funds to empower girls, said she hopes Farooqi’s group will finish building a prototype by May or June. In all, the team has 15 members who work on various projects.
The ventilator model, once completed, would then be sent to the Health Ministry for testing, initially on animals, said spokesman Wahid Mayar.
Farooqi, who was just 14 years old when she participated in the first World Robot Olympiad in the US, in 2017, said she and her team members hope to make a contribution.
“Afghans should be helping Afghanistan in this pandemic,” she said. “We should not wait for others.”
The idea formed on a day when all the news headlines were dire. The coronavirus was surging worldwide; Nashville had lost lives in a devastating tornado and children had their lives upended as they separated from beloved classmates to shelter at home.
But only bad news is never the whole story. Days later, The Associated Press started its daily series “One Good Thing” to reflect the unheralded sacrifices made to benefit others that normally wouldn’t make a story, but maybe always deserved one.
Since March 17, when a Norwegian mom tried to soften the blow of birthdays under quarantine for her two teens by asking via social media that people reach out to them, there have been 35 stories about the ways that everyday people have tried to make a positive difference in the lives of others. The gestures have been grand and small, some as simple as chalk-written messages on a sidewalk thanking healthcare workers at a New Orleans hospital for their efforts.
Music has been a central theme. The series has included stories about a Rio firefighter sharing his love of music from a hydraulic ladder 150 feet up as he played the trumpet for cooped-up apartment dwellers; a virtual rendition of “Bolero” from the National Orchestra of France, with each musician playing alone at home; the virtual Corona Community Choir with members around the world, performing on Sundays.
If music soothes the soul, food feeds it. There have been six stories that tell of benefactors feeding health care workers, the poor, the elderly shut ins, even volunteers feeding hungry animals at a revered Hindu temple in Kathmandu, Nepal.
There have been meals from Brooklyn
caterer Israel Frischman for Holocaust survivors who are shut in. The day after the story ran, donations poured in and now Frischman has financial backing for the needed meals. And simpler fare from the “Solidarity Menu” started by Emiliano Moscoso, who employed his hamburger chain of restaurants in Colombia to feed poor neighborhoods in Bogota.
The delivery of lifesaving supplies has been a storyline as well, from the professional cyclist in Italy who has gone from racing against competitors to racing medicine to those in need, to Yale student Liam Elkind’s delivery service. A month after reporting on Elkind’s “Invisible Hands” effort which he started with a friend, he reports that it’s ballooned. “We’re making over 1,000 deliveries a week now, and over 10,000 volunteers have joined our group. I feel like I haven’t slept in decades, but, honestly, I’ve never felt more energized,” he said.
Heroes have emerged in youth, from Nova Knight, a 5-year-old firecracker in Alaska imploring her cohorts to wash their hands and postpone playdates, to 16-year-old TJ Kim, who can’t drive, but can fly. He uses those skills to deliver much-needed medical supplies across rural Virginia.
The stories have circled the world, from Colombia and Nepal, to Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Israel, Indonesia and South Korea where Kim Byung-rok, a shoe cobbler, donated land to help raise money for the fight against the virus.