The Monk, the Rapid Sand Filter, and NASA
Engineers Without Borders–USA, Manna Energy Foundation, and Rwandan volunteers installing 408 watts of solar panels and lighting for a remote Rwandan hospital on the border with the Congo. The system provides emergency lighting for surgery. From left: John Jannetto, Kiran Vinta, Niko Kalinic, Ron Garan, Evan Thomas, Jean Pierre Habanabakize.
When Evan Thomas went on his first Engineers Without Borders project in Nepal, it must have sounded too easy: Install an Internet-connected solar-powered computer in a remote village outside of Kathmandu.
The reasons behind the project were more complex. According to Thomas, an aerospace engineering graduate student at the University of Colorado, “The reason we did this project is because it’s a very rural community, and the kids were leaving the village for opportunities in Kathmandu. Not only was the village dying, the youth weren’t better off when they left; in fact, they were becoming urban poor in Kathmandu.” The computer was intended to offer the youth a connection to the world so they wouldn’t have to leave.
And then the project took a few interesting turns. Thomas crossed paths with a Buddhist monk who was founding a thangka painting school in the village to develop more educational and economic opportunities for the village. The monk gave Thomas insight into the 1,200-year-old art tradition, which is a monastic devotional style of colorfully rendered narratives on silk. After Thomas returned to the States, Maoist rebels damaged the computer.
The Nepal project demonstrates how a simple Engineers Without Borders (EWB) project can engage education, technology, culture, infrastructure, economics, and politics. The EWB teams of graduate students and professional engineers encounter all of these things when working in collaboration with and alongside the locals while on a project site, and also long before they leave the US when they first come together as a team to fund and plan their projects.
Bernard Amadei, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder who founded Engineers Without Borders-USA in 2001, says, “EWB-USA is leading the way in taking a closer look at how these components influence collaborative development in community projects. Only with this systems approach will people begin to make the connection between sustainability, engineering, and a healthy and safe community.”
Catherine A. Leslie, a professional engineering consultant, has been executive director of EWB-USA for three years and has presided over a wave of expanding chapters (there are now 192 chapters nationwide) and more than 114 projects in 36 countries.
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Photo: Evan Thomas |
A 12,000-liter catchment system installed by EWB-USA provides over half a million liters of water capacity per year for a boarding school of 600 Rwandan girls |
Leslie explains EWB’s approach: “Overseas, you need to focus on the people and you have to focus on low technology. The developing world is people-based. We encourage all of our students and professionals to go to their anthropology or social sciences department to get an education about going into a foreign culture. Some of the things they learn to do are easy things, such as bringing gifts for their hosts.”
She sums up the difference between working as an engineer in the States and in a developing country. “Over here, as professionals, we work with many different entities, and all design work is reviewed and approved by them as the eventual owners. On an EWB project, we have to make sure our projects take care of all the issues, as there are no review agencies, just a responsibility to the community.”
In addition to working with the whole community, EWB’s projects also address socioeconomic concerns that impact the long-term success of a project.
“When we start talking to the community, it’s not only what you want to see; it’s what you can afford to maintain. Over here, you don’t organize a maintenance committee. With EWB, that’s done up front. The first conversation with village elders is, ‘So, you want a water tank. Do you have someone to clean out that water tank once a year, and how are you going to pay that person?’ So we frequently do business plans for people. You really get to be creative. But you have an enormous amount of responsibility, because you need to make sure the community can keep it running and benefit from it. We plan on visiting those communities frequently. Certain things have a certain shelf life. You assume things won’t last as long. You can talk about fees—in terms of ‘Can every family contribute a chicken a year?’ These villagers are relying on us for a long time.”
Starting with the economics of maintaining infrastructure in perpetuity has advantages over other approaches that create a reliance on continuing foreign aid that institutes a “charity culture” in which the outsiders become privileged over the stakeholders to solve the local problems.
EWB’s model has proven itself. When the Maoist rebels came to the Nepalese village and broke the computer, the small user-based fee scale that EWB had set up to create an emergency computer repair fund functioned exactly as planned and allowed the villagers to carry the computer to Kathmandu and get it fixed without the help of EWB or charity.
Most notably, EWB’s work makes an immediate impact on the communities that lack basic infrastructure to mitigate common environmental issues.
“When they have a severe water shortage, they really appreciate what we’re doing. You get feedback directly. They tell you how much they appreciate what you’re doing. They told us they were trusting in God and in us that they would get a water system. It’s a huge amount of responsibility,” says John Cullor, a graduate student in hydraulic engineering at Colorado State University who worked on a project in El Salvador.
Dan Garbely, a CH2M Hill engineer based in Portland, OR, says, “The biggest difference is the community involvement with the end user. It’s different, but it’s one of the things that make people want to get involved. A lot of time dealing with municipalities you don’t get to interface with the communities that are going to use the wastewater plant. A lot of times it’s because something is controversial.
“On an EWB project where you’re dealing with a community of 500 or 2,000, you can take time to talk to people in the community and get a feel for people’s perspective,” he continues. “Here a lot of people take our infrastructure for granted. [We have] roads, water comes out of the tap, sewage goes away, and people don’t think about it. When you’re in a developing community and people have to haul water 5 miles a day, people are spending a huge part of their life doing that, and they have an opinion about the project. If you’re the one carrying a gallon of water on your head 5 miles a day, your input is going to be pretty much right on. If you talk with the village chief, you’ll get one perspective, but if you talk to the women’s groups, they’ll tell you they spend all of their days doing this. It goes beyond politics because you have the cultural challenge as well.”
The guiding principle for EWB is sustainable design. That in itself is a challenge because sustainability means different things to different people in different contexts.
“Sustainability means making things user-friendly and local so they don’t fail. It’s about using appropriate technology and local materials as much as possible. Not all of our projects achieve that. We’re getting better. It’s difficult because we bring the American engineering mindset into these projects, and that’s not necessarily the best solution. There have been times when we wonder if we’re finding the right solution. We have a lot of debates about whether we should use available materials—but when asbestos roof tiles are available, should you use them? Building materials are the biggest challenge because you don’t always know what you’re going to get,” says Garbely.
Says Leslie, “There are great debates that go on in terms of project design. We first build prototype projects here. We do a site assessment and speak with elders, women, everybody, and look for materials and bring them back and test them to see what kind of strength they have. So we know quite a bit about what we’re doing before we start design. But supplies change and we do have backup plans—if prices go up or we can’t put something in the ground. But it is a challenge.”
Of all of the EWB projects, none seems more important than those past and present in Rwanda. There aren’t many places with a worse recent history than Rwanda. The genocide in 1994 killed 800,000 people in 100 days.
Says Thomas, who is now involved in one of the Rwanda projects, “We travel together with another chapter to Rwanda to two different projects. So far we’ve installed florescent lights in a hospital so they can deliver babies at night with light. We also installed lights—four panels in the hospital where the church was in the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families [that was the basis for the film Hotel Rwanda].”
In hearing Leslie and Thomas talk about their Rwanda experiences, it is clear that these projects hold something rare for engineers—historical significance. The engineers encounter reminders of the Holocaust as they work to provide electricity and wastewater treatment for a girls’ school and hospital. They realize how these small projects may allow the community to move closer to the possibility of having a normal existence again. It brings a new meaning to “civil” engineer.
Rwanda isn’t the only place that EWB engineers have learned firsthand about major social changes. Garbely, who worked in Thailand, explains, “The history of the community [in Thailand] was that after World War II there were Chinese soldiers stationed in that area to stop Japanese. A lot of these soldiers got stuck in Thailand and started the opium trade there, and they built a lot of things in the community. A few years ago, masked men killed off the main drug lord in that community. It had happened just two or three years before the project. The Thai government established an agriculture resource center and retrained the villagers and provided a market for them. It was interesting to see a society in transition.”
Dick Herring has been involved with EWB since 2001. As a senior engineering consultant and businessman, he is drawn to EWB for being able to get as many solutions on the ground as possible without having to navigate bureaucratic red tape. And yet he fondly recalls the time he faced red tape of a completely new type.
“We planned to go to Thailand to build a new medical clinic. They got a new regional director of health, and he said no to the project. The missionary for that village wrote a letter to the king of Thailand saying he’d like to build a building and dedicate it in honor of the birthday of the queen. So the district approved it. The week before I got there the government asked if we could rearrange the whole inside of the building.”
The only problem Herring wasn’t prepared for was that when dealing with royalty, it’s difficult to say no. And, on the plus side, working for royalty has its own rewards.
“The following year I went to see the prince who was in charge of the project. He said to me, ‘I want you to build this preschool for this village for me. Can you do that?’ When we did the dedication for the medical clinic, the prince was there. When [we finished the project], they had a special celebration. We took everyone up to the village and they showed us their dances and had a feast. It was a wonderful experience.”
While EWB’s infrastructure projects unexpectedly hold visceral meaning, they in turn provide opportunities to apply novel and sustainable technical applications. Rwanda’s next infrastructure project will be a rainwater collection and purification system that combines a rapid sand filter with a solar-powered ultraviolet light bulb for drinking-water treatment, believed to be the first combination of these elements. Thomas hopes this system will inform his work as a NASA engineer, which he begins this summer after graduation. A biogas reactor test project is also being planned for Rwanda, with hopes that if acceptable to the villagers, it could be scaled up to provide a source of renewable energy.
Herring envisions big opportunities for these kinds of projects. “I’d like to see us go to a village of 5,000 to 10,000 people and work on clean water. Even if it’s a slow sand filter. Low-tech solutions can really work on a large scale.”
As all of the participants are aware, EWB projects can profoundly change communities and also change the way the engineers view their work and its place in the world.
Herring is inspired to do more. “Doctors Without Borders responds to short-term disasters and war. We like to work on long-term problems. If we solve some of problems ahead of time, that solves some of the problems for them. They just make do with what they’ve got. We introduce the things that work.”
Garbely says, “It’s been a great experience. I jumped in with both feet. It’s amazing how many lives you can touch with a relatively small project and small technology.”
Leslie notices the projects’ effects on the local people. “I’m always surprised when I see the expertise that exists in the villages. There was an erosion project, and all of a sudden the kids started imitating what we had been doing and were building drop structures.”
Thomas received his own personal thangka painting. “The artist makes one at a time for each person by thinking of a characteristic that person embodies and then reading scripture about that quality and meditating on that quality.” After a pause, Thomas observes, “I’m looking at nine years to get a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, and the monk studied thangka painting for 15 years.”
Author's Bio: Laura Funkhouser, M.A., is Forester Media marketing manager.