You Don't Have to Be Catholic to be Helped by Nuns

On the passing of John Lewis, the young 1963 Civil Rights leader who went on to represent Georgia in Congress for 33 years, one tribute mentioned nuns who administered a Selma, Alabama, hospital took care of him when he was beaten by police in 1965. A female Muslim student wrote a prize-winning story about a nun, the principal of a college in Bangladesh, who saw she was absent, visited her family and arranged to help her continue her education after her unemployed father could no longer afford tuition. Shamima Sakendar's story is now a film, "The Soul," which can be viewed on Facebook and YouTube. Taken together, these mentions of the unheralded contributions religious orders of women reminded me of the legally-trained nuns who represent immigrants in courts at the US border and the recently deceased Sister Carolyn Farrell, who had helped plan, at the invitation of Iowa's governor, the State's long-term goals. She also was elected to the City Council in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1977 and became mayor in 1980, since Council members held that office on a rotating basis. The work nuns do in Africa is extremely important. To prevent young women from being lured into the human trafficking trade, nuns in Bukoba, Tanzania, help students become self-sufficient in a 3-year sewing program. At graduation, they receive their own sewing machines. Since 1989, nuns in Kampala Uganda, have provided a home for as many as 30 abandoned babies and children under five at a time. When mothers die in childbirth after traveling long distances to deliver their newborns, relatives often cannot be found to care for the babies. In other cases, women flee from abusive husbands who are left with children they don't want, husbands leave to seek work in cities or abroad and never return and friends and relatives shun women and children who are HIV positive. With help from volunteers, the nuns carry the babies, sleep with them and maintain a cow and chickens to provide milk and eggs to feed them. The nuns try to find caring relatives by posting children's photos in local newspaper ads. If no relatives are found and the children have not been adopted by age 6, they are transferred to a children's home and then a group home until they can support themselves. As carbon dioxide's greenhouse gases continue to raise the Earth's temperatures, the organic farming practices of nuns in drought-ridden Chilanga, Zambia, provide a valuable example of how to produce a variety of indigenous fruits, cabbage, kale, maize, tomatoes, onions and beans as well as how to raise cows, goats and chickens. By drilling a borehole, the nuns were able to install an irrigation system to spray water over crops. They also use manure as organic fertilizer and crop rotation to keep from depleting soil nutrients. Mixing crops grown on the farm helps control insect damage. Without becoming Catholic, people around the world benefit from the care nuns provide.

Want to Reach Global Citizens?

Watch and reference what global citizens watch. Nielsen's research found 57% of adults aged 18 to 34 spend 11 hours a day on interactive social media. Trendwatching.com noted the Lisboeta hotel in Macau, China, and pop-up stores in New York City and Hollywood were using characters from a Japanese app in their decors. Emojis and other social media and app icons now join Disney characters as multi-format global presenters, especially in venues that attract tourists from around the world.

     Since potential customers already are watching something on their smartphones, they are a captive audience for anything, such as merchandise, food, films, and concerts, associated with what they are seeing right in their hands.

     The AFLAC insurance company has combined the traditional advertising art of creating recognizable characters, like Tony the Tiger, to connect customers to their brands with emojis from apps and social media. Working with the medical tech firm, Sproutel, AFLAC turned its recognizable duck into a companion for hospitalized children. Kids receiving chemotherapy can hook up their free ducks to IVs that demonstrate how that process works. In addition, when kids tap their ducks' chests with emoji discs, ducks act out feelings to show the medical staff and visitors if they are sad, happy, or about to cry or throw up.

Robots for Good

Where can techies around the world go to collaborate with other techies? One creative space is Wevolver.com, the web platform where co-founder, Richard Hulskes, offers open-source hardware technology and a way for people with project ideas to collaborate and build physical, tangible products at home. Pascal Jaussi, an engineer and Swiss Air Force military pilot, had a similar idea to make space accessible. His Swiss Space Systems in Payerne, canton Vaud, assembles existing components and uses proven technologies from the United States, Russia, Europe, and Asia to create sub-orbital reusable aircraft that can put commercial satellites into orbit.

      The forces that have come together in Hulskes' "Robots for Good" project illustrate just how powerful technological collaboration can be.

One project provides an example. By combining:

• an Ultimaker 3D printer
• the head and torso of the humanoid InMoov 3D printable robot
• the free, downloadable blueprint and materials for an Open Wheels segway
• Samsung's head-mounted, virtual display oculus rift
• software
• children working with Ultimaker personnel at MakerMovement spaces in London
• seriously ill children at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital

some hospitalized children are about to self-direct a virtual experience at the London Zoo.

     One team in London is using the 3D printer to assemble an InMoov robot and Open Wheels segway that can move. Another in the U.S. is working on software. Kids will drive the robot with a remote control. And, wearing an oculus rift, they will be able to move the robot's head by moving their heads and to see through the robot's eyes.

     Remote controlled drones also are being designed to fly over wildfires to relay information about  sources of water in ponds and wells and escape routes to firefighters on the ground. According to National Geographic Kids (May, 2015), roboticist Thomas Bewley at the University of California at San Diego is already developing a drone like this. Only a little larger than a postage stamp, his drone requires less energy than it takes to power a lightbulb.

(Also see related ideas in earlier blog posts, "Play, Computer Connections, and Pets Come to the Aid of Sick Kids," "I Made This Myself," "Transform Spaces into Creative Places," and "Robot Revolution.")


   

 

Play, Computer Connections, and Pets Come to the Aid of Sick Kids

Years ago when my four-year-old daughter was in the hospital with an infection, there was a room reserved for play, where needles, pills and painful procedures were banned. She really perked up when she learned to play her first video game.

     Nowadays, a new pilot project designed by Gokul Krishman, a Ph.D. candidate at Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University, is bringing a mobile creative space to young patients who can't leave their hospital rooms. Drawing on the idea of the MakerMovement, a cart carries a 3-D printer, tablet computer on a swivel arm, a circuit board that cycles lights through the rainbow, and bins filled with items kids can use to create solutions to problems they face in the hospital. Of course, patients can communicate room to room using the computer.

     One patient wanted to stop nurses from just entering her room without knocking, so she fitted a tissue box with wires and switches and posted a sign on her door that read, "Ring My Doorbell." Another stopped nurses from waking sleeping patients by making a Nurse Night Light that only lit up the toilet and trash areas of his room.

     Developed in Israel, a new "Sesame" Google Nexus Phone enables those with certain disabilities to mAake telephone calls by using gestures and voice controls.

     The later post, "Want to Reach Global Citizens?" reports on the free AFLAC ducks the insurance company gives hospitalized children to help them use emojis to tell the medical staff and visitors how they feel. 

     Even back in 2002, before there was Skype, Len Forkas worked with a school system's head of technology to equip his sick son's home bedroom and fourth grade classroom with computers and cameras and an internet connection. Microsoft's NetMeeting software enabled the boy with acute lymphoblastic leukemia to see his classroom and to talk with friends every morning and after recess. Based on this initial experience, Hopecam (hopecam.org) now works with schools to cut through red tape to provide kids homebound with
cancer with tablet computers, web cameras, and high speed internet connections that enable them to participate in classroom activities and interact with their friends. Sometimes, even if a child only Skypes for a half hour with classmates each week, parents report that this little spot of sunshine makes a big difference.

     Julia Havey, a nurse at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing at Loyola University in Chicago,
observed that brief interactions with pets also could make a big difference for a group of her patients. If they received daily visits from specially trained dogs for five to 15 minutes while they were recovering from total joint-replacement surgery, they required 28% less oral pain medication than those in a group similar in age, gender, ethnicity, length of hospital stay, and the same type of total joint replacement who did not receive animal therapy visits. Havey concluded that therapy animals can have a positive influence on human recovery, because the animal-human connection reduces stress and generates a sense of well-being. Indeed, other research has found that interaction with pets decreases the level of the cortisol stress hormone and increases endorphins, considered the happiness hormone.

      The organization, Dogs on Call (dogsoncall.org), provides pet therapy dogs not only to hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospices, but also to libraries, dorms, and schools where students are stressed, especially during final exams.

(For other examples of ways to improve the lives of sick kids, see the blog post, "Robots for Good.")