These encyclopedias presented information to me that primed me for an experience that would stay with me to adulthood. Every child experiences an event that collides uncomfortably with real life and perception. It is the natural inclination of any person to rationalize troubling images to fit an orderly and just existence. I had seen images of animals eating other animals, but it didn't bother me. It was a fact of life that I accepted and flaunted with what I thought was maturity. One summer when I had just turned eleven, I visited my grandmother who kept chickens in her yard. She indulged my curiosity and allowed me to watch as she butchered a hen. What I saw were two transformations. I saw her transform the chicken from a being with agency into an object. I watched her behead it and begin to cut its body into separate lumps. In the wreckage I saw the small veiny undeveloped eggs concealed like pearls in this hen's body. The second transformation I saw was of us; my grandmother, who ceased to be a caretaker but a determined woman with a knife and a victim and me, a spectator with that awful potential. With the curtain pulled back I knew there were entire processes of which I was devastatingly ignorant. Afterwards, watching Looney Toons maim each other left me feeling queasy. The image stayed with me, it opened up an ethical question that I was only able to verbalize later in high school.

My visceral example of a transformative event that led me to question meat eating is what leads others to devote their lives to a cause. When I think about what kind of events have lasted with me, and driven me to rethink how I live or what I chose to study, I draw inspiration from women like Amy Smith, whose inventions have improved the quality of so many lives without profit to herself.

What makes Amy Smith deserving of mention on this day is that she witnessed a problem and did not consider that it was too much for a single person's ingenuity. As a second grader, she lived in India for a year while her father taught there. During that year she came face to face with extreme poverty. Having her affluent existence in Massachusetts punctuated with grave humanitarian issues meant that she could not have gone back to the same mode of living. She, too, had a veil removed and saw the effect that one life has upon another. There are many who would forget or accept such experiences as mere facts of life but she returned with ideas that save lives. She brought briquettes made of charcoal, water filters, hammerless grain mills. These 'low-tech' items change lives and they are free to use and duplicate.

The idea that an expensive piece of technology is necessary to perform a basic function in a third world country means that it is out of reach for those that need it most. What she has done is bring down the cost to virtually nothing with her technologies. As a student at MIT she had developed an incubator that warms without electricity. The deforestation of Haiti meant that people could no longer find cheap cooking fuel. Amy devised a solution to create safe-burning charcoal out of plant waste that was otherwise being discarded. "[The charcoal briquette] is my $100 laptop," she says.

There is no surprise that she has won many honors for her kind of humanitarian engineering including the first female recipient of the MIT-Lemelson Prize and a MacArthur "Genius" grant. She co-founded the IDEAS competition at MIT where students help solve a problem for the needy. Winners receive grants to develop their technology. Such inventions have included cheap solar cells, and portable water testing devices.

The above is really besides the point, it seems natural with Smith's vision that it would not take long for her to receive attention for her projects. I am not writing about her solely because she is a brilliant and distinguished woman. There are women who have dedicated lives to science and technology out of a love of what they do. It is plain to me that Smith has made a philosophical choice to structure her life around teaching humanitarian engineering as well as inventing solutions to worldwide problems. She is someone who very clearly knows the power that she possesses. 

Learn more about Amy in Smithsonian Magazine and the Boston Business Journal, and watch her TED talk:

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