W/Spaces) Boston University\'s Focus on Green Technology

¶ … W/Spaces)

Boston University's focus on green technology and practices is one of the most appealing aspects of the institution and one of the main reasons I hope to attend the university. Developing renewable forms of energy is a concept already close to my heart from having grown up in a Palestinian community that constantly endures the difficulties, inconveniences, and consequences of limited access to electricity that is barely sufficient to support ordinary life. That was my original motivation for subscribing to Renewable Energy World Magazine and for participating in the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving such problems.

In the West, renewable energy is an issue whose importance relies largely on conceptualizing future implications of current circumstances. However, in many parts of the Middle East, such as in my home community, the consequences and privations attributable to the inadequate availability of green technology have already manifested themselves profoundly in the everyday lives of people. For example, in the occupied Palestinian Territories, typical families must spend as much as one-tenth of their total annual earnings on electric power just to sustain the bare minimum necessary for ordinary life functions. Even then, it is not at all unusual for the community to lose power periodically. The usable energy that we do have relies on electricity that is imported at great cost from outside the Territories, which dramatically increases its cost to the community. In my experience, very few people of my age who were raised in the West have ever actually experienced the first-hand consequences of living in circumstances where electricity is too expensive or too scarce to support their needs. As someone who has lived in those circumstances and who has also studied the issue empirically, I hope to be able to provide my future college classmates with a perspective to which they may never have been exposed except in the most detached way, such as by reading about it or watching televised documentaries about people living in foreign nations.

Partly because of the need to overcome the barriers imposed by limited access to electric power, I spent several months in 2011, together with a team of friends, developing a cheap MP3 system designed to enable sight-impaired users to upload and listen to audio books. In conjunction with the National Society for the Visually Impaired, we read books aloud, recorded them electronically, and uploaded them onto CDs. After the organization received complaints about the difficulty of tracking and finding desired books, we were inspired to develop a technological solution modeled after Apple's "iPod shuffle" system. We increased the capacity of our system to store large numbers of books in a portable format that included a "VoiceOver" title-identification function that allowed users to hear the title's name. To keep the product affordable, we duplicated iPod components in an electrical factory in Ramallah, Palestine. Our finished product cost one-third of the price of the iPod Shuffle and allowed 10 times the storage capacity. It was doubly meaningful achievement, because of the technical challenges and the tremendous value it added to the lives of users by allowing them to overcome their barriers to accessing, connecting, and participating in the world of their peers.

Finally, I hope to bring to Boston University my experiences as a participant in the Environmental Education Center's Clean-Up Campaign. While recycling trash, we also developed creative uses for trash that appealed greatly to the children in the community and that served as an effective learning tool to introduce concepts such as environmental responsibility and ecology to young students. We created modernistic sculptures of an unexpected variety of forms, including musical instruments and holiday themes, such as a large Christmas tree, entirely from recycled trash. We discovered that these types of projects provide effective recruiting tools to capture the interest of children. Initially, they were much more interested in this "artistic recycling" but their involvement then seemed to inspire their genuine interest in the recycling concept and in learning about ecology. Ultimately, what had begun as a casual pastime resulted in artistic displays that were featured at the Bethlehem Peace Center.