Sean Keenan
Sean Keenan
Luther College
Participant in the 2010 ACM Student Symposium on Off-Campus Study
Water from Rock: Reflecting on Field Experiences in Tanzania
My time in Tanzania facilitated personal growth and cultural awareness through a variety of rich experiences. I had never seen a person drink from a water source that was so dirty and salty, it was nearly opaque. I had never been witness to a drought that left only the worst water sources available, which destroyed a local economy and transmitted diseases into a rural community.
My presentation will focus on how I initially went to Tanzania to study ancient lake-level fluctuations and margin geology, but left with an interest in how people are affected by natural resources, particularly how rural Tanzanian communities struggle to obtain clean drinking water.
Atop granite plutons in the Lake Eyasi Basin in northern Tanzania.
Although my field research project was a geology project based exclusively in the natural sciences, I found myself much more interested in where natural sciences and human resource consumption meet – where a keen understanding of the environment can significantly aid communities by providing information about where and how natural resources should be obtained.
Seeing the difficulties that the rural community had in obtaining clean water gave me a new perspective on the ways in which geologic knowledge could be used, which led me to new career ideas. Natural resource experts, conservationists, or geologists could all be of great benefit to rural communities in search of clean drinking water.
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