Engineers recognized for Rwanda aid
 group of engineering students that is helping
to build basic infrastructure systems in the poor, war-torn African
country of Rwanda garnered international recognition for its efforts
May 30 in Berlin.The UW-Madison Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter
received the Mondialogo Engineering Award, a UNESCO (United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and Daimler-Chrysler
initiative to recognize engineering achievements aimed at meeting United
Nations millennium development goals and fostering intercultural dialog.
The Rwanda project group, which also includes students
from the University of Colorado-Boulder and numerous institutions in
Rwanda, was among 21 project teams from 28 countries to receive the
award. More than 1,700 engineering students from 79 nations registered
for the competition, forming 412 international teams.
Rwanda has little functional infrastructure, and
basic systems that carry clean water or sewage are lacking in many parts
of the country. Because of Rwanda’s mountainous terrain, building
centralized water systems is difficult, so drinking water has to be
found and delivered locally. Villagers often must walk several miles
if their local water system breaks down—and often that water is
untreated. For the past two years, students in the UW-Madison EWB chapter
worked on improving a gravity-fed system that supplies water for the
community of Muramba in an area that includes about 9,000 villagers
and 3,000 schoolchildren. The group also is working on reducing Rwandan
deforestation by teaching villagers solar cooking and water pasteurization
methods.
Geological engineering undergraduate Evan Parks was
one of two EWB team leaders in Rwanda. He says the EWB students thought
they would be doing lots of the “high-tech” engineering
they’d learned in school. Rather, the experience taught them to
apply more basic skills. “The Murambans all knew what needed to
be done and they already have important skills,” he says. “They
just needed a little bit of money and they needed a little bit of motivation
and that’s what we provided. We also helped them with some of
the engineering and gave them some suggestions—not as project
leaders or managers, but as advisors.”
Working with the residents to develop sustainable
systems—those villagers will be able to use and maintain for years
to come—that meet their needs gave the EWB students a new perspective
on how they approach engineering. “I think you really need to
be able to listen to people and understand their problems because you’re
not going to know the solutions before you visit,” says Parks.
“I think just sitting on the hillside just talking with people
gets you a lot farther.”
For Parks, who grew up in Slinger, Wisconsin, working
in Rwanda was a life-changing experience. The country’s citizens,
he says, have overcome enormous obstacles, including poverty and personal
tragedy, to get to where they are today. “If things aren’t
going well, I just think, ‘That person in that place has faced
so many more difficulties than me and look at how their attitude is,
and how they wake up each day and try to improve their lives and the
lives of their companions,’” says Parks. “That’s
very inspiring to me and it makes me want to continue in this capacity
as an engineer.”
UW-Madison’s EWB chapter formed three years
ago to develop internationally responsible engineering students via
partnerships with disadvantaged communities. Professor Peter
Bosscher (who received the College of Engineering Ragnar E. Onstad
Service to Society Award this spring) is its advisor. “This award
demonstrates that the international community appreciates the good sustainable
efforts of our work in Rwanda,” he says. “Perhaps the recognition
will make our efforts at fund-raising more productive. The award,
which includes a monetary prize of about $7,000, defrayed a portion
of the cost of our continued efforts in Rwanda in July 2005.”
Those efforts included adding water sources to community,
improving the quantity of water, and improving the quality of water
through solar pasteurization. The group demonstrated solar food cookers
(a simple box lined with aluminum foil and covered with glass—a
system that takes advantage of the area’s high altitude and intense
sunlight) and showed residents how to make fuel out of discarded organic
materials like paper and garden waste. “You can compost it, dry
it out, and then using a fuel press, you can make fuel pellets out of
it that people can use for cooking, because Rwanda is almost completely
deforested,” says Parks.
The students also helped open markets for Rwandan
products such as handcrafts, baskets and artwork. “I think we’re
taking steps to work with them to help them meet their own needs—not
our needs,” says Parks.
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