Project Spotlight: Engineers Without Borders

By John Paul Peng     11/1/11 7:00pm

When something as essential as basic infrastructure breaks down, most of us would call the government. When that's not possible, there's Engineers Without Borders, a national organization that travels worldwide to act as the engineering component in vital developmental projects. The Rice University chapter of EWB is responsible for three projects involving bridge construction, health clinic building and water purification.

One of their projects involves building bridges in Nicaragua, a country where tropical rainfall levels and a lack of infrastructure have forced people living in remote places to travel through dirty, knee-high water if they want to go anywhere. In one rural community near Jinotepe, Nicaragua, EWB has just completed a bridge.

"The community members are thrilled with it," Project Leader David Younger said. "They use it very frequently."

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Hopeful volunteers don't have to fret about missing all the fun either: the project group is already in the planning phase for another bridge, this one near rapidly urbanizing Matagalpa, to link two suburbs with a combined population of about 15,000.

"There were a lot of people that were wading through this river, which is downstream of the city of Matagalpa, so it's very contaminated," Jones college senior Younger said about the preassessment trip for the second bridge.

Bridges aren't EWB's only contribution. A second project group, one near the Venezuelan city of Pueblo Nuevo Sur, has recently finished a health clinic for the rural community. Without the clinic, people in the community would have to wait weeks for a chance to see a doctor.

But not everything can be done with just concrete and medicine, Project Leader Vivas Kumar explained.

"In addition to constructing the actual health clinic, we also held a health education campaign for schoolchildren in the local schools," Kumar said. "We taught them basic hygiene and basic anatomy so that they would be educated to avoid the diseases that have plagued the community for several years before we had come."

The group also values sustainability.

"One way we introduce this is by contacting the community constantly. We are able to do this by calling them, which is pretty incredible considering the remoteness of the community we work with," Project Leader Joseph Vento said.

In 2012, the project group is planning to revisit the clinic to make sure everything, including the centralized medical system's agreement to send visiting doctors twice a month, is still running.

Large construction projects aside, EWB is also concerned with basic needs. A third project group in El Salvador is tending to one of the most basic needs of all: clean drinking water. Multiple people living in communities without clean drinking water have suffered problems as severe as kidney failure.

The group made a final monitoring trip last December to their most recent water purification project in a community near El Pital.

"We found that the community had fully taken ownership of the project, had enhanced it, and based upon those very satisfactory findings, we were able to conclude the project," Project Leader Justin Ng said.

The El Pital project is one in a succession of water purification and distribution projects. This coming summer, the group will travel to Los Alas for an assessment as part of a five-year project that started in August last year.

"We found a community that was very e n t h u s i a s t i c and very united behind the prospect of a water project that we could bring," Ng said, who noted a sharp contrast to the local government's efforts, which have not produced any lasting response.

"Without community support, the project would not be possible," Ng said.

Without student support, though, EWB would not be possible. Students interested in getting involved with EWB can find more information including contact emails at ewb.rice.edu.

"Project Spotlight" is a weekly feature that looks at student projects that are making a difference in the Rice community

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