{"id":485,"date":"2019-03-18T23:28:46","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T23:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/?p=485"},"modified":"2020-06-07T23:36:24","modified_gmt":"2020-06-07T23:36:24","slug":"usc-astani-dept-makes-innovative-real-life-impact-for-refugees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"USC Astani Dept Makes Innovative Real Life Impact For Refugees"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How An Innovative Course Is Taking On The Largest Mass Migration Crisis Since WWII<\/h3>\n

By\u00a0Daniel Druhora
\nUSC Viterbi Spring 2019<\/p>\n

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The postman only rang once.
\n<\/strong>Sadiq was at home in Kabul, enjoying tea. Peeking through the window, he caught a glimpse of the postman running off. It seemed odd for the postman not say hello.<\/p>\n

\u201cGo check on Irfan,\u201d he told his wife, Raihana. She ran upstairs to their sleeping 3-year-old son.<\/p>\n

Just then, the front door burst open, knocked off its hinges by a gang of Taliban, faces covered, weapons drawn. When Raihana came out of their son\u2019s room and saw Sadiq surrounded by Kalashnikov rifles aimed at his head, she fainted and fell over the balustrade to the floor below.<\/p>\n

The rest is a blur. Sadiq remembers boots fanning through the house. He could hear things crashing, men yelling and Irfan crying.<\/p>\n

The warning letters had finally caught up to them. The first kindly asked for cooperation. The second demanded information and included a \u201cwe know where you live\u201d warning. The last threatened his life. What made Sadiq Muhammad Hakimzada a marked man was his work as a translator for the U.S. Special Forces. By the end of 2014, American troops had left Afghanistan, handing over responsibility for security and the rule of law to local Afghans. Shortly thereafter, the names of American collaborators started appearing on Taliban hit lists.<\/p>\n

It took Raihana two weeks to wake up from her coma. By then, all their possessions, including their car, were gone. Having retrieved what they needed, the Taliban warned Sadiq he would not escape their watch. Taking Raihan\u2019s hand, Sadiq promised they would leave Afghanistan for good.<\/p>\n

The birth of their second son, Rizvan, delayed their escape by one year. But on Nov. 4, 2017, Sadiq, Raihana and their sons set off on a weeks-long trek without food or water, hiding in forests and giving the last of their money to smugglers to pack them into a small boat with 80 people bound for Greece.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo mother puts her kids on the sea unless she feels the water is safer than the land,\u201d said Raihana, who was shoved to the front with her sons so that guards would not shoot at the boat to turn it around. Sadiq was tasked with steering the boat for the four-hour journey, putting 80 lives literally in his hands. No one on board knew how to swim. Sadiq and Raihana quickly said their goodbyes: \u201cIf we die, we die together, as a family.\u201d<\/p>\n

At dawn, they landed on the Greek island of Lesvos, picked up by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, and taken for processing in Camp Moria. Sadiq and Raihana were happy to be alive and on European shores, but nothing had prepared them for the realities of Moria.<\/p>\n

As the bus carrying new arrivals approached the former military base, Raihana looked out the window at the giant scrawl across the wall: \u201cWelcome to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Challenge
\n<\/strong>Nearly 7,000 miles away in Los Angeles, 26 students representing seven USC schools were given a challenge: split in teams, partner with refugees and create a solution to help people caught up in the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.<\/p>\n

Innovation in Engineering Design for Global Challenges, offered through the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is the first of its kind at USC and, as of this writing, at any engineering school in the nation. It takes graduate and undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines, puts them in teams, and sends them to hotspots throughout the world to design and engineer solutions to global crises in chaotic environments. The teams have just two semesters and $6,000 each to tackle such problems as improved sanitation, shelters, electricity, mental health, education, access to information and security.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just coming out of jetlag from visiting family in India and a couple of nights playing Fortnite, and you\u2019re asking me to do what?\u201d Arya Bhatia, a USC Marshall School of Business junior remembered thinking. \u201cI understood right then and there that this course was unlike anything I had ever taken before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The course has three instructors led by Burcin Becerik-Gerber, USC Viterbi associate professor in civil and environmental engineering. Becerik-Gerber has spent her professional life imagining an intelligent environment and laying the groundwork for smart buildings and systems that can interact with humans. As a Turkish-American, Harvard-educated scholar who has had to redefine what home means multiple times, she says she has been constantly bothered by the question, what about people who don\u2019t have a home at all?<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a researcher, you always want to work on something that changes people\u2019s lives,\u201d she said. \u201cEach time I visited home in Turkey, I came face to face with the human toll of the refugee crisis, and it motivated me to take this challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

The course\u2019s motto, coined by instructor Brad Cracchiola, is \u201cLives, not grades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cracchiola, who led the team credited with building the world\u2019s fastest racing wheelchair at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, crushing four world records and winning seven medals, including four gold, recalls reading the expressions in the room that first day: the stunned, the expectant, the fearful and the hopeful.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were doing introductions and students stood up and started excusing themselves for their majors,\u201d he said, \u201csaying things like, \u2018I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m not an engineer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Cracchiola cut the pity party short: \u201cAs of this moment, you\u2019re all engineers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re designing and building something new, you\u2019re a designer, you\u2019re an inventor. Period. No excuses. Don\u2019t let a label limit what you can do in this class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Into Moria
\n<\/strong>The first group of 15 USC students arrived in Moria on September 15. Siena Applebaum, a mechanical engineering junior at USC Viterbi, as well as a University Trustee Scholar and a Viterbi Fellow, and Erna Redzepagic, a social entrepreneurship graduate student at the USC Marshall School of Business, were among them.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur job was to hear what the refugees were telling us the problems were,\u201d said Redzepagic, who grew up a refugee in Germany after she fled the war in Bosnia with her family.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found is shock and disbelief at the conditions people fleeing violence and war were living in,\u201d said Applebaum who\u2019s Turkish language skills helped her communicate with some refugees.<\/p>\n

Life in Moria, they learned, is an endless flow of queues. Eighty-five showers are shared among some 9,000 to 10,000 residents. Raihana wakes up at 5 a.m. and lines up in a two-hour queue to take a shower. Sadiq waits by to ensure she isn\u2019t assaulted, an all-too-common occurrence in the camp. After this, he joins a queue for breakfast, which can take another two hours. By the time he brings breakfast back to the family\u2019s tent, he must get back in line for lunch. Then there are the endless, frustrating queues of people waiting for an exit stamp on their asylum papers and a ticket to the mainland. Fights are common and can quickly devolve into riots.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, tensions are rising among some locals who fear the European Union is bent on turning their island, once a popular tourist destination, into a refugee archipelago. Since the 2016 EU-Turkey Agreement, which effectively bottlenecked the flow of boats, the Greek government has confined refugees and migrants to five islands for the duration of their asylum process. Lesvos, just 6 miles from Turkey, is one of them, and it is seeing continued strain on its resources as an estimated 90 people still arrive on the island daily. The effects are both palpable and visible. In the town of Moria proper, where 67 stores once blossomed with local produce spilling out into the cobbled streets, only 14 remain open. And those are protected by cages and barbed wire.<\/p>\n

According to camp management, this was the first time a university course was granted full access to Moria. Typically, only registered NGOs and their volunteers have access. Students also met with representatives from the Moria Community Council to hear the viewpoints of the local residents affected by the crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrototypes, Not PowerPoints\u201d
\n<\/strong>To help guide the course, students were teamed up with 10 refugee global partners \u2014 young people whose education was interrupted due to conflict. They advise each team and join course sessions virtually from Germany, Norway, Spain and Greece.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am first a human being, then a refugee,\u201d said Maryam Payenda a refugee global partner based in Germany. Payenda is one of the very few women in Afghanistan to graduate with a degree in computer science. \u201cI feel compelled to help fellow refugees. Knowing that I can connect with USC students to solve real problems is a great opportunity for me to show the world, together, that refugees are part of humanity. We shouldn\u2019t be left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2018 that an unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are 25.4 million refugees, more than half under the age of 18. In addition to persecution and war, climate change and economic instability have added fuel to the ongoing mass migration.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is about tangible, real-world impact,\u201d said David Gerber, one of the course\u2019s three instructors, an architect and designer whose work integrates computer science, robotics, engineering and architecture. \u201cIt\u2019s a paradigm shift to get students to forget about the grade and think about the innovation and the impact. Don\u2019t just tell me what you\u2019re going to build \u2014 show me. Build it out of paper, build it out of cardboard, but start with something. This class is about prototypes, not PowerPoints.\u201d<\/p>\n

The course is funded in part by Provost Michael Quick\u2019s Wicked Problems Practicum, the Min Family Engineering Social Entrepreneurship Challenge, the office of USC Viterbi\u2019s Dean Yannis C. Yortsos, Los Angeles-based real estate developer Sonny Astani, M.S. ISE \u201978, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, Walter Singer \u2019B.S. \u201982, and Murat Sehidoglu, M.S. ISE, M.B.A. \u201980. United Engineering Foundation is sponsoring a documentary film that follows the students as they race against the clock, and themselves, to turn their ideas into reality.<\/p>\n

Their support allowed students to return to Moria on February 5 with prototypes in hand. Led by Becerik-Gerber, Cracchiola, course coordinator Daniel Druhora and accompanied by Astani, the students spent over a week testing their prototypes inside Moria R.I.C. and Kara Tepe, officially called the Hospitality Center for Refugees and Migrants Mavrovouni (Kara Tepe).<\/p>\n

Redzepagic returned with a portable shower that can be built by refugees using readily available materials. The team struggled through several prototypes, multiple failures and roadblocks before they committed to one idea they want to implement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe learned from this second trip that people want to participate in building their own shower because it gives them a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise powerless situation,\u201d said Nina Singh, a biomedical engineering senior who helped develop the shower prototype. \u201cThe solution may not be us building and shipping showers to these camps as we originally thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before leaving, the students gave their prototype to a young family in need, namely, Sadiq and Raihana Hakimzada.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not happy to live in a camp,\u201d Sadiq said, \u201cbut I\u2019m happy that you didn\u2019t forget us. People like us, who fought alongside Americans, to see people like you did not forget \u2014 it gives us hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t innovate in a bubble,\u201d said Becerik-Gerber. \u201cIt\u2019s important to expose students to the realities of the crisis and to help them make the connections to local stakeholders, international aid organizations, regional and local governments, private enterprise and refugees themselves. We need all of these actors to tackle the problems as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are thankful for the help provided by USC and its students,\u201d said Moria\u2019s commander, Yiannis Balbakakis, who has led efforts to relieve overcrowding in the camp by transferring over 3,000 asylum seekers to the mainland since September. \u201cWe need fresh ideas, your ways of thinking about the problems we face,\u201d he told the students.<\/p>\n

In addition to testing in the camps, teams presented their prototypes at a major pitch event on March 7 in Lesvos to officials from Greek federal and local governments; representatives of UNHCR and other major NGOs, Greek universities and local business leaders such as the Lesvos Local Development Co., ETAL S.A., which is responsible for over 100 million euros in local development projects on the island over the past 15 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mission of USC in Lesvos had a variable we don\u2019t often see in the past four years of the crisis,\u201d said Anastasios Perimenis, CEO of ETAL, an instrumental partner in the course\u2019s efforts in Lesvos. \u201cIt went deeper. It got inside the heart of the local challenge to manage the situation. It inspired local action. We have already benefited from invaluable friendship, knowledge, experience and lessons in solidarity \u2014 a rare opportunity for two opposite sides of the world coming together in a common effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the students, the opportunity to leverage engineering skills to help solve intractable problems is exhilarating.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been working on a lot of theory-based ideas, but so far none of my classes gives me the opportunity to demonstrate what I\u2019ve learned,\u201d said Sofia Tavella, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering whose team is building an information aggregator smartphone app for Moria. \u201cThis class actually uses the skills we learn and puts them to the test.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGive it wings\u201d
\n<\/strong>The instructors want to offer the course again next year and hope it becomes a model for how to train a new generation of engineers to respond to global crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough rapid iteration and through questioning their assumptions, but not only \u2014 through tangible and visceral experiences \u2014 our students are learning how important empathy is to the success of their projects,\u201d Gerber said.<\/p>\n

As for Sadiq and Raihana, three days after the USC students left the island, they got their stamps to leave for Thessaloniki. They hope to make it from there to Washington where Raihana\u2019s sister lives. And the portable shower? Passed on to another family awaiting their ticket.<\/p>\n

In fact, before thousands of units are manufactured and shipped to camps all over the world, they all left something behind. Team Waterway, which designed a backpack system for carrying water, left their prototype to an expecting mother in Moria. Team Duet, which is rethinking the way philanthropy is done, successfully delivered their proof of concept: a bag of diapers purchased by someone in Los Angeles for a family of refugees resettled on the island.<\/p>\n

Other teams left less tangible things behind \u2014 ideas forever implanted in the minds of stakeholders. Team Safar, which is building the world\u2019s first camp-specific information aggregator, inspired a group of often disjointed government agencies and NGOs to envision a way for their life-saving information to come together. Team Amber, which is making an ultra-low-cost thermal fleece with special features for refugees, left an indelible impression on one young refugee woman who didn\u2019t want to part with their first cool-looking prototype \u2014 an \u201cinflatable\u201d jacket that keeps the wearer warm using air. \u201cYou forgot one thing,\u201d she told them. \u201cGive it wings so I can fly away from here.\u201d<\/p>\n

USC VITERBI NAMED A PARTNER INSTITUTION FOR STATE DEPARTMENT PROGRAM<\/h2>\n

Diplomacy Lab offers students and faculty an opportunity to tackle urgent issues in world affairs<\/em><\/p>\n

The University of Southern California\u00a0<\/strong>has been selected as a partner institution for Diplomacy Lab, a program of the U.S. Department of State that provides students and faculty with hands-on experience on global policy challenges.<\/p>\n

Starting this spring, USC Viterbi will serve as the central hub for this new USC-State Department partnership, which will call on faculty and their students from across campus to consider solutions for urgent issues governing international affairs. Najmedin Meshkati, professor of civil and environmental engineering, industrial and systems engineering, and international relations, is the program\u2019s academic lead.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are honored to be recognized as a Diplomacy Lab partner by the U.S. Department of State,\u201d said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. \u201cThis distinction recognizes the enabling nature of engineering and of technology innovation in our times, which we have promoted at USC Viterbi as Engineering+. We look forward to our students and faculty providing interesting, empowering solutions to vexing problems in international diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

USC\u2019s involvement in the program is an outgrowth of Meshkati\u2019s Engineering Diplomacy course. Meshkati, a former Jefferson Science Fellow and senior science and engineering advisor to the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser of the U.S. Secretary of State, has incorporated Diplomacy Lab challenges into his courses.<\/p>\n

One of Meshkati\u2019s students, Stefani Mikov, B.S. \u201917, an industrial and systems engineer, was a finalist in the Diplomacy Lab\u2019s Wonk Tank competition in April 2016, presenting an innovative project to redesign Syrian refugee camps in Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis partnership recognizes our efforts to fuse an engineering thought process with foreign policy and international development,\u201d said Meshkati, who is currently on sabbatical as a fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Office of Global Partnerships builds and facilitates partnerships that leverage the creativity and innovation of the private sector and civil society, and Diplomacy Lab is a unique opportunity for the Department of State to tap into the vast intellectual reservoir that is the American higher education system,\u201d said Thomas Debass, the State Department\u2019s acting special representative for global partnerships. \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled to welcome USC into our diverse network of over 30 partner institutions, knowing full well that their students and faculty will contribute meaningfully to achieving the Department\u2019s foreign policy objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The State Department is responsible for responding to a wide array of challenges, including climate change, weapons non-proliferation, democracy and human rights, counterterrorism, global health, energy security, gender equality, economic policy, trafficking in persons, food security and conflict stabilization. Each semester, the agency releases a list of proposed projects to its 30 partner universities. Universities then identify faculty members to lead teams of students in research and innovation that address a given challenge. These teams bid on a maximum of four project proposals that align with their strengths. Once a project bid is approved, teams work in a semester-long sprint to develop a final work product that accomplishes the goals outlined by the department.<\/p>\n

FINDING SOLUTIONS TO REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS<\/h2>\n

The student-teams in the Innovation in Engineering Design for Global Challenges course are working on the following prototypes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Safar
\n<\/strong>Safar, which means \u201cjourney\u201d in Farsi and Arabic, is a mobile app built that serves as an information aggregator to help guide refugees upon arrival at a refugee camp. Safar will be the first app to address location-specific refugee needs in real time. It achieves this by pulling critical information from several official sources and user feedback, then integrating this data into an easily accessible, dynamic interface, much like the Waze app does for drivers.<\/p>\n

Sol
\n<\/strong>Sol is building a portable, lightweight shower that will help refugees and others enjoy the dignity of a proper shower in an outdoor camp or hospitality centers, or inside ISO containers, reducing the shortage of shower stations and increasing privacy. Unlike existing shower solutions made for outdoor camping, Sol\u2019s design uses a water recycling system to reduce environmental impact and improve sanitation.<\/p>\n

Amber
\n<\/strong>Amber is a clothing brand focused on making highly functional, low cost, sustainable clothing designed specifically for emergency response scenarios. Their first product, the amber thermal will provide cost effective protection from the cold, from disease, and from noise, while keeping users’ essential documents safe. This can be a life-saving solution when conflict or disaster first breaks out and refugees or internally displaced people are fleeing.<\/p>\n

WaterWay
\n<\/strong>WaterWay is a durable, lightweight container to help people comfortably transport water over long distances. The container will include over-the- shoulder straps and weight manage- ment reinforcements to help the user carry water on their back. Offering fill and spigot simplicity, this water-back-pack can serve as a water reservoir that can be suspended from anywhere and will also have built-in filtration and purification elements.<\/p>\n

Duet
\n<\/strong>Duet is a philanthropic initiative that pairs backers and resettled refugees through specific and meaningful item-based donations. Using matching algorithms, it pairs a purchase in the United States, for example, with a product that a refugee or displaced person needs and can\u2019t afford, but yet is readily available in a host nation. Described by its team as the \u201cUber of micro-philanthropy,\u201d Duet seeks to eliminate donation waste by connecting givers to individuals\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How An Innovative Course Is Taking On The Largest Mass Migration Crisis Since WWII By\u00a0Daniel Druhora USC Viterbi Spring 2019   The postman only rang once. Sadiq was at home in Kabul, enjoying tea. Peeking through the window, he caught a glimpse of the postman running off. It seemed odd for the postman not say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":488,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astanienterprises.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}