Our second to last day at FHI 360 ended up being one of our busiest – we had four different meetings/speeches with just an hour or so off in the morning, but I found it was one of the most engaging + fun days we’ve had during our entire time with the CTID team. My favorite meeting of the day was one we weren’t even originally planning on attending: FHI 360 has this really cool program of brown bag lunches – they bring in speakers who are experts on their topics, whether from inside or outside the company. The brown bag we attended today was given by a rising college freshman who had taken a gap year in Senegal through the Global Citizen Year program. He’d spent around a year living with a host family in a village outside of Dakar, doing service projects and becoming immersed in Senegalese culture. I thought the program itself sounded amazing, as I’d really loved connecting with my host family in Austria, but it also made the work FHI 360 does seem even more accessible possible in the near future for teens like Chloe, Caroline, Maddie, and I.
Another meeting that was really cool today was the one on the use of drones for public health. We met with Marga Eichleay, who is in charge of the drone program at FHI 360, to talk about new innovations. She showed us videos of swarms, where dozens drones are programmed to interact with their surroundings and each other and fly in formations, and she talked about the possible ethical problems with privacy and other countries’ policies on drones. The coolest things we talked about were the current medical uses – in cities, drones are used to deliver AEDs to people having heart attacks to avoid traffic, and a startup in Rwanda is using drones to send blood and treatments out to isolated clinics that need the supplies but may not have refrigeration to store them. And also, the French Air Force has trained golden eagles (eagles!!) to attack dangerous drones and bring them to the ground.
– Hope
