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KABUL, Afghanistan – Most mornings, Somaya Farooqi and four other teenage girls crowd into her father’s car and head to a machine shop. They use back roads to bypass established police checkpoints to enforce a blockade in their city of Herat, one of the hot spots of the coronavirus pandemic in Afghanistan.
Members of Afghanistan’s award-winning girls’ robotics team say they’re on a life-saving mission: build a breathing machine from used car parts and help their war-torn country fight the virus. .
“If we even save a life with our device, we will be proud,” said Farooqi, 17.
His search is particularly notable in conservative Afghanistan. Just a generation ago, during the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban rule in the late 1990s, girls were not allowed to go to school. Farooqi’s mother was pulled from school in third grade.
After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, girls returned to schools, but obtaining equal rights is still a struggle. Farooqi is not discouraged. “We are the new generation,” he said in a telephone interview. “We fight and work for people. Girl and boy, it doesn’t matter anymore.
Afghanistan faces the pandemic with almost empty hands. It has just 400 fans for a population of over 36.6 million. So far, it has reported a little over 900 cases of coronavirus, including 30 deaths, but the actual number is suspected to be much higher as test kits are in short supply.
Herat province in western Afghanistan is one of the nation’s hot spots due to proximity to Iran, the epicenter of the outbreak in the region.
This has encouraged Farooqi and her team members, ages 14 to 17, to help find a solution.
On a typical morning, Farooqi’s father picks up the girls from their homes and takes them to the team’s Herat office, zigzagging down the side streets to skirt the checkpoints. From there, another car takes them to a mechanic’s workshop on the outskirts of the city.
In Herat, residents are only allowed to leave their homes for urgent needs. The robotics team has a limited number of special car permits.
So far, Farooqi’s father has been unable to get one, but the girls are in a hurry. “We are concerned about the security that comes out of the city, but there is no other option, we have to try to save people’s lives,” said Farooqi.
In the workshop, the team is experimenting with two different designs, including an open source plan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Parts used include the engine of a Toyota wiper, batteries, and bag valve mask kits or manual oxygen pumps. A group of mechanics helps them build a fan frame.
Daniela Rus, a professor at MIT, appreciated the team’s initiative to develop the prototype. “It will be great to see it tested and produced locally,” he said.
Tech businesswoman Roya Mahboob, who founded the team and raises funds to empower the girls, said she expects the Farooqi group to finish building a prototype by May or June. In total, the team has 15 members working on various projects.
The ventilator model, once completed, would then be sent to the Ministry of Health for testing, initially on animals, spokesman Wahid Mayar said.
Farooqi, who was just 14 years old when she participated in the first ever World Robot Olympiad in the United States in 2017, said she and her team members hope to make a contribution.
“Afghans should be helping Afghanistan in this pandemic,” he said. “We should not wait for others.”
